What Happened on April 20th in History
30 historical events on this date
The April Uprising begins. Its suppression shocks European opinion, and Bulgarian independence becomes a condition for ending the Russo-Turkish War.
The April Uprising was an insurrection organised by the Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire from April to May 1876. The rebellion was suppressed by irregular Ottoman bashi-bazouk units that engaged in...
Pope Leo XIII publishes the encyclical Humanum genus, condemning Freemasonry.
Humanum genus is a papal encyclical promulgated on 20 April 1884 by Pope Leo XIII.
U.S. President William McKinley signs a joint resolution to Congress for declaration of war against Spain, beginning the Spanish–American War.
William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. A member of the Republican Party, he led a realignment that made Republicans largely...
Pierre and Marie Curie refine radium chloride.
Pierre Curie was a French physicist and chemist, and a pioneer in crystallography and magnetism. He shared one half of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Curie, for their work on...
Opening day of competition in the New South Wales Rugby League.
The New South Wales Rugby League Ltd (NSWRL) is an Australian rugby league football competition operator in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory and is a member of the Australian...
Nineteen men, women, and children participating in a strike are killed in the Ludlow Massacre during the Colorado Coalfield War.
The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel...
World War I: Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a. The Red Baron, shoots down his 79th and 80th victims, his final victories before his death the following day.
World War I, or the First World War, also known as the Great War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Central Powers. Major areas of conflict included Europe and the...
The Soviet government creates the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast within the Georgian SSR.
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until its dissolution in 1991. It was the world's...
World War II: U.S. troops capture Leipzig, Germany, only to later cede the city to the Soviet Union.
World War II, or the Second World War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated. Tanks and aircraft played major...
World War II: Führerbunker: On his 56th birthday Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
The Führerbunker was an air raid shelter located near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Germany. It was part of a subterranean bunker complex constructed in two phases in 1936 and 1944. It was the...
Twenty Jewish children used in medical experiments at Neuengamme are killed in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school.
Nazi Germany conducted medical experiments on prisoners in its concentration camps mainly between 1942 and 1945. There were 15,754 documented victims, of various nationalities and ages, although the...
The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the United Nations.
The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that...
Amethyst incident: The People's Liberation Army attacks HMS Amethyst (F116) travelling to the British embassy in Nanjing during the Chinese Civil War.
The Amethyst incident, also known as the Yangtze incident, was a historic event that occurred on the Yangtze River for three months in the summer of 1949, during the late phase of the Chinese Civil...
Cold War: Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
The Cold War was a period of international geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist...
English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial "Rivers of Blood" speech.
John Enoch Powell was a British politician, soldier, scholar and writer. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West for the Conservative Party from 1950 to February 1974 and the...
South African Airways Flight 228 crashes near J.G. Strijdom Airport in South West Africa (now Hosea Kutako International Airport in Namibia), killing 123 people.
South African Airways Flight 228 was a scheduled flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, to London, England. The Boeing 707-300C operating the flight, which was only six weeks old, flew into the...
Apollo program: The Apollo 16 Lunar Module Orion, commanded by John Young and piloted by Charles Duke, lands on the Moon.
The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, which landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969. Apollo was conceived in 1960 in the...
University of California, Riverside 1985 laboratory raid: Animal Liberation Front rescues 467 animals being tested in a lab at University of California, Riverside in Riverside, California, causing $700,000 in damages to the laboratory, in advocacy for animal rights.
In 1985, a raid took place at a laboratory belonging to the University of California, Riverside (UCR) that resulted in the removal of a monkey by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). This monkey,...
Air France Flight 422 crashes after taking off from El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia, killing all 53 people on board.
Air France Flight 422 was a scheduled flight on 20 April 1998 by Air France from Bogotá, Colombia, to Quito, Ecuador, covering the final leg of a flight from Paris to Quito. The Boeing 727 was...
Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 14 people and injure 23 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
On April 20, 1999, high school senior students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 13 students and one teacher in a school shooting and attempted bombing at Columbine High School in Columbine,...
The Nicoll Highway in Singapore collapses, killing four workers.
Nicoll Highway is a major arterial road in Singapore which links the junctions of Guillemard Road, Sims Way and Mountbatten Road in Kallang to the junctions of Esplanade Drive, Raffles Avenue and...
Johnson Space Center shooting: William Phillips barricades himself with a handgun in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, before killing a male hostage and himself.
The Johnson Space Center shooting was an incident of hostage taking that occurred on April 20, 2007, in Building 44, the Communication and Tracking Development Laboratory, at the Lyndon B. Johnson...
Danica Patrick wins the Indy Japan 300, becoming the first female driver in history to win an Indy car race.
Danica Sue Patrick is an American former professional racing driver who competed in the IndyCar Series from 2005 to 2011 and the NASCAR Cup Series from 2012 to 2018. She is the most successful woman...
The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning an oil spill that lasted six months.
Deepwater Horizon was an ultra-deepwater, dynamically positioned, semi-submersible offshore drilling rig owned by Transocean and operated by the BP company. On 20 April 2010, while drilling in the...
One hundred twenty-seven people are killed when a plane crashes in a residential area near the Benazir Bhutto International Airport near Islamabad, Pakistan.
Bhoja Air Flight 213 was a domestic scheduled passenger flight operated by Pakistani private airline Bhoja Air from Karachi to Islamabad. On 20 April 2012, the Boeing 737-236A aircraft serving the...
A 6.6-magnitude earthquake strikes Lushan County, Ya'an, in China's Sichuan province, killing at least 193 people and injuring thousands.
The moment magnitude scale is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude based on its seismic moment. Mw was defined in a 1979 paper by Thomas C. Hanks and Hiroo Kanamori. Similar to the local...
Ten people are killed in a bomb attack on a convoy carrying food supplies to a United Nations compound in Garowe in the Somali region of Puntland.
The Garowe attack was a bombing of a UN van in Garowe, Puntland, Somalia. Between 7 and 10 people were killed, including the attacker and four UNICEF workers. The Al-Shabaab militant group claimed...
For the first time in history, oil prices drop below zero, an effect of the 2020 Russia-Saudi Arabia oil price war.
The price of oil, or the oil price, generally refers to the spot price of a barrel of benchmark crude oil—a reference price for buyers and sellers of crude oil such as West Texas Intermediate (WTI),...
State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin: Derek Chauvin is found guilty of all charges in the murder of George Floyd by the Fourth Judicial District Court of Minnesota.
State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin was an American criminal case in the District Court of Minnesota in 2021. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was tried and convicted for the...
SpaceX's Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, launches for the first time. It explodes four minutes into flight.
Starship is a two-stage, fully reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle under development by American aerospace company SpaceX. Currently built and launched from Starbase in Texas, it is intended...