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Monday 25 April 2016

April 24

April 24
858 St. Nicholas I begins his reign as Catholic Pope.
1519 Envoys of Montezuma II attend the first Easter mass in Central America.
1547 Charles V’s troops defeat the Protestant League of Schmalkalden at the Battle of Muhlberg.
1558 Mary, Queen of Scotland, marries the French dauphin, Francis.
1792 Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composes “La Marseillaise”. It will become France’s national anthem.
1800 The Library of Congress is established in Washington, D.C. with a $5,000 allocation.
1805 U.S. Marines attack and capture the town of Derna in Tripoli from the Barbary pirates.
1833 A patent is granted for the first soda fountain.
1877 Russia declares war on the Ottoman Empire.
1884 Otto von Bismarck cables Cape Town, South Africa that it is now a German colony.
1898 Spain declares war on United States, rejecting an ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.
1915 Turks of the Ottoman Empire begin massacring the Armenian minority in their country.
1916 Irish nationalists launch the Easter Uprising against British occupation.
1944 The first B-29 arrives in China, over the Hump of the Himalayas.
1948 The Berlin airlift begins to relieve the surrounded city.
1953 Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
1961 President John Kennedy accepts “sole responsibility” for the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
1968 Leftist students take over Columbia University in protest over the Vietnam War.
1980 A rescue attempt of the U.S. hostages held in Iran fails when a plane collides with a helicopter in the Iranian desert.
1981 The IBM Personal Computer is introduced.
1989 Thousands of Chinese students strike in Beijing for more democratic reforms.
Born on April 24
1620 John Graunt, statistician, founder of demography.
1743 Edmund Cartwright, English parson who invented the power loom.
1766 Robert Bailey Thomas, founder of the Farmer’s Almanac.
1769 Arthur Wellesley, general during the Napoleonic Wars, Duke of Wellington.
1815 Anthony Trollope, British novelist.
1856 Henri Philippe Pétain, French Marshall, WWI hero, Nazi collaborator.
1900 Elizabeth Goudge, English author.
1904 Willem de Kooning, abstract impressionist painter.
1905 Robert Penn Warren, novelist, America’s first poet laureate.
1906 William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw,’ British traitor, Nazi propagandist.