April 15th
Today in America's Present Past
1741 | Painter Charles Willson Peale was born.
1783 | War of Independence: The Continental Congress ratified preliminary articles of peace, ending the seven-year-long war with Great Britain.
1786 | Physician Walter Channing was born.
1814 | Historian John Lothrop Motley was born.
1817 | Civil War: The first American school for the deaf opens.
1829 | America’s first female surgeon, Mary Harris Thompson, was born.
1843 | Novelist Henry James is born.
1861 | Civil War: Union forces mobilize to fight succeeding southern states, mustering an initial 75,000 volunteers.
1865 | POTUS: President Johnson was sworn in.
1865 | Civil War: Union forces liberate Mobile, Alabama.
1870 | Activist Emma Willard died.
1874 | Brooks-Baxter War in Arkansas.
1879 | Poet Melville Henry Cane was born.
1892 | General Electric Company was formed by the merger of Thomas Edison's General Electric Company with Thomson-Houston Electric Company.
1894 | Musician Bessie Smith was born.
1912 | Entrepreneur John Jacob Astor IV died (aboard the Titanic).
1927 | Physicist Robert Mills was born.
1924 | Rand McNally publishes its first road atlas.
1937 | Entrepreneur Robert W. Gore was born.
1943 | Chemists Robert Lefkowitz was born.
1947 | Civil Rights: Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play major league baseball.
1952 | Franklin National Bank issues the first bank credit card.
1955 | Entrepreneur Ray Kroc opens the first McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois.
1960 | Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organizes at Shaw University.
1964 | At its opening the world’s longest bridge, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, opens.
1978 | Musician Chris Stapleton was born.
1979 | Herman Hill riot in Wichita, Kansas.
1981 | Admiral John Thach died.
1997| Writer Sam Moskowitz died.