At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the British ocean liner Titanic
sank into the North Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles south of
Newfoundland, Canada. The massive ship, which carried
2,200 passengers and crew, had struck an iceberg two and
half hours before.
The iceberg thought to have been hit by Titanic, it was
reported to have a streak of red paint from a ships hull
along it s waterline on one side.
President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head at Ford’s
Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. The assassin,
actor John Wilkes Booth, shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!
(Ever thus to tyrants!) The South is avenged,” as he jumped
onto the stage and fled on horseback. Lincoln died the next
morning.
The Presidential Box today at Ford’s Theatre, Washington DC.
An armed group of white supremacists attacked a courthouse
guarded by a mostly-Black militia in the town of Colfax,
Louisiana on April 13, 1873. A bloodbath ensued, as the
militia surrendered and the white supremacists carried out a
day-long campaign of terror that came to be known as the
Colfax Massacre.
Robert MacNeil, formerly the anchor of the evening news program
now known as "PBS News Hour," died Friday of natural causes at
New York-Presbyterian Hospital at 93.
On this day in 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed
away partway through his fourth term in office, leaving Vice
President Harry S. Truman in charge of a country still fighting
the Second World War and in possession of a weapon of
unprecedented and terrifying power.
In the afternoon of April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia,
while sitting for a portrait by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, Roosevelt
said: "I have a terrific headache." He then slumped forward in
his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom.
The president’s attending cardiologist, Howard Bruenn, had
diagnosed a massive intracerebral hemorrhage.
The last photograph of U.S. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, taken at Warm Springs, GA by Nicholas
Robbins for Elizabeth Shoumatoff.
Engraving of the Four Freedoms at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, dedicated in 1997 in Washington,
D.C.
