April 24
Nanking taken by communists
1949: Communist forces occupied the Chinese capital, Nanking, on this day, after crossing the Yangtze River virtually unopposed by adherents to the Nationalist government under President Chiang Kai-shek.
1970: The Gambia became a republic, achieving full independence from the United Kingdom.
1967: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first man to die during a space mission when his spacecraft became entangled in its parachute during the attempted landing.
1916: Members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized strategic points in Dublin during the Easter Rising, which heralded the end of British power in Ireland.
1898: Spain declared war on the United States.
1877: War broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the Serbo-Turkish War, resulting in independence for Serbia and Montenegro.
1792: French army officer Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed "La Marseillaise," the French national anthem.
Willem de Kooning
Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning, born this day in 1904, was one of the leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism, particularly the form known as Action painting.
"If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today."
Willem de Kooning, interview with the BBC, December 30, 1960
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