TODAY IN HISTORY ― APRIL 26

April 26 is the 116th day of the year (117th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 249 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Friday or Saturday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Wednesday (56). 

NATIONAL RICHTER SCALE DAY 

1336 – Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ascends Mont Ventoux. Petrarch claimed to have been inspired by Philip V of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemo and that an aged peasant had told him that nobody had ascended Ventoux before or after himself, 50 years before, and warned him against attempting to do so. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance.  

  

1478 – The Pazzi attack Lorenzo de' Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Duomo of Florence. The Pazzi conspiracy was itended to dethrown the Medici from the ruling family of Florence.

1564 – Playwright William Shakespeare is baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (date of actual birth is unknown).

1777 – Sibyl Ludington, aged 16, rides 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British.

1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France, as part of a reconciliation gesture with the factions of the Ancien Régime and to eventually consolidate his own rule.

1803 – Thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of L'Aigle, France; the event convinces European scientists that meteors exist.

1805 – First Barbary War: United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon.

1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina. This was the basis for the date of Confederate Memorial Day.

1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.

1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.

1937 – Spanish Civil War: Guernica (or Gernika in Basque), Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.

1943 – The Easter Riots break out in Uppsala, Sweden. Thousands of anti-fascists gathered to protest against the Nazi gathering at the Royal Mounds, a historical site that held much political symbolism among Swedish nationalists.

1945 – World War II: Battle of Bautzen ― The last successful German tank-offensive of the war and last noteworthy victory of the Wehrmacht.

1964 – Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.

1965 – A Rolling Stones concert in London, Ontario is shut down by police after 15 minutes due to rioting.

1970 – The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization enters into force. The Agreement marked a transition for WIPO from the mandate it inherited in 1967 from BIRPI, to promote the protection of intellectual property, to one that involved the more complex task of promoting technology transfer and economic development.

1986 – A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world's worst nuclear disaster.

1989 – The deadliest tornado in world history strikes Central Bangladesh, killing upwards of 1,300, injuring 12,000, and leaving as many as 80,000 homeless.

1989 – People's Daily publishes the People's Daily editorial of April 26 which inflames the nascent Tiananmen Square protests

1991 – Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak's end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year's only F5 tornado.

1994 – China Airlines Flight 140 crashes at Nagoya Airport in Japan, killing 264 of the 271 people on board.

2002 – Robert Steinhäuser infiltrates and kills 16 at Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt, Germany before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot.

2005 – Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country (Syrian occupation of Lebanon).

BORN TODAY

1785 – John James Audubon, French-American ornithologist and painter (d. 1851)

1822 – Frederick Law Olmsted, American journalist and designer, co-designed Central Park (d. 1903)

1894 – Rudolf Hess, Egyptian-German politician, 2nd only to Adolph Hitler in the Nazi Party (d. 1987)

1900 – Charles Francis Richter, American seismologist and physicist (d. 1985)

1917 – I. M. Pei, Chinese-American architect, designed the National Gallery of Art and Bank of China Tower

1922 – Margaret Scott, South African-Australian ballerina and choreographer

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