TODAY IN HISTORY ― APRIL 15

April 15 is the 105th day of the year (106th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 260 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Wednesday, Friday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Monday or Tuesday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Thursday or Saturday (56). 

NATIONAL TAKE A WILD GUESS DAY

1450 – The Battle of Formigny: Toward the end of the Hundred Years' War, the French attack and nearly annihilate English forces, ending English domination in Northern France.

1755 – Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language is published in London.

1783 – Preliminary articles of peace ending the American Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence) are ratified.

1861 – President Abraham Lincoln calls for 75,000 Volunteers to quell the insurrection that soon became the American Civil War

1865 – President Abraham Lincoln dies after being shot the previous evening by actor John Wilkes Booth. Vice President Andrew Johnson, becomes President upon Lincoln's death.

1896 – Closing ceremony of the Games of the first modern Olympiad is held in Athens, Greece.

1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg, in 12,500 feet of water. Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survive.

1920 – Two security guards are murdered during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti would be convicted of and executed for the crime, amid much controversy.

1922 – U.S. Senator John B. Kendrick of Wyoming introduces a resolution calling for an investigation of a secret land deal, which leads to the discovery of the Teapot Dome scandal.

1923 – Insulin becomes generally available for use by people with diabetes.

1927 – The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, begins.

1945 – The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is liberated.


1947 – Jackie Robinson debuts for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball's color line.

1970 – During the Cambodian Civil War, massacres of the Vietnamese minority results in 800 bodies flowing down the Mekong river into South Vietnam.

1989 – Upon Hu Yaobang's death, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 begin in China.

2013 – Two bombs explode near the finish line at the Boston Marathon in Boston, Massachusetts, killing three people and injuring 264 others.

2014 – More than 200 female students are declared missing after a mass kidnapping in Borno State, Nigeria.


BORN TODAY

1452 – Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, sculptor, and architect (d. 1519)

1684 – Catherine I of Russia (d. 1727)

1707 – Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician and physicist (d. 1783)

1843 – Henry James, American novelist, short writer, and critic (d. 1916)

1889 – Thomas Hart Benton, American painter and educator (d. 1975)

1894 – Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, Russian political commissar, general and politician, 7th Premier of the Soviet Union (d. 1971)

From Wikipedia and Google (images), ex as noted.