April 13: Thai New Year's Day
1598 - King Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, allowing freedom of religion to the Huguenots.
1883 - Alferd Packer was convicted of cannibalism.
1919 - British and Gurkha troops opened fire on a peaceful political gathering in Amritsar, Punjab in India, killing hundreds of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims.
1943 - World War II: The discovery of a mass grave of Polish prisoners-of-war executed by Soviet forces in the Katyn Forest Massacre was announced in Germany, driving a wedge between the Allies, the Polish government-in-exile in London, and the Soviet Union.
April-12th- U.S. Civil War begun
1861: In the American South, Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency was taken as the signal for secession, and, beginning in December 1860, states of the lower South withdrew from the Union. One by one most of the U.S. forts in the Southern states were taken over by secessionists. On this day in 1861, Fort Sumter, South Carolina, one of the few military installations in the South still in Federal hands, came under fire by Confederate guns in Charleston, thus initiating the American Civil War.
1981: The first space shuttle, Columbia, was launched by NASA.
1961: Russian cosmonaut Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first man in outer space.
1945: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia.
1606: The Union Flag, precursor to the Union Jack, was adopted as the national flag of Great Britain.
1204: Alexius V, the last Greek emperor of a united Byzantium, fled Constantinople in the face of the Fourth Crusade. |
