April 14
1943: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in East Potomac Park on the south bank of the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C.
1941: Japan concluded a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union in World War II.
1846: The Delaware, Lehigh, Schuylkill, and Susquehanna Railroad Company, which became the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company in 1853, was founded.
1640: Charles I of England convened the Short Parliament, the first to be summoned in 11 years.
1598: Henry IV of France promulgated the Edict of Nantes in Brittany, granting a large measure of religious liberty to his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots.
Alfred Dreyfus imprisoned on Devils Island
1895: French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was assigned to the War Ministry when, in 1894, he was accused of selling military secrets to the German military attaché. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment on the infamous penal colony of Devils Island, off the coast of French Guiana; by 1899 he was brought back to France for retrial. The legal proceedings of the original trial, based on insufficient evidence, were highly irregular, and the case—or l'Affaire, as it came to be called, centring on issues of militarism, anti-Semitism, and nationalism—brought about a social crisis within France.
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