Effingham’s daily news on history in brief.

Today in History: April 15

On this day in 1912, the British luxury liner RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sunk in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland, resulting in the deaths of 1,514 people. Below are more notable events that happened on April 15 throughout history:

Other Events on April 15

In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln died nine hours after being shot the night before by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Andrew Johnson became the nation’s 17th president.
In 1892, General Electric Co., formed by the merger of the Edison Electric Light Co. and other firms, was incorporated in Schenectady, New York.
In 1945, British and Canadian troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died on April 12, was buried at the Roosevelt family home in Hyde Park, New York.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson, baseball’s first Black major league player of the modern era, made his official debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on opening day at Ebbets Field.
In 1955, Ray Kroc opened the first franchised McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois.
In 1974, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army held up a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco; a member of the group was SLA kidnap victim Patricia Hearst, who by this time was going by the name “Tania” (Hearst later said she’d been forced to participate).
In 1989, 96 people died in a crush of soccer fans at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England. Students in Beijing launched a series of pro-democracy protests; the demonstrations culminated in a government crackdown at Tiananmen Square.
In 1998, Pol Pot, the notorious leader of the Khmer Rouge, died at age 72, evading prosecution for the deaths of 2 million Cambodians.
In 2009, tens of thousands of protesters staged “tea parties” around the country to tap into the collective angst stirred up by a bad economy, government spending, and bailouts.
In 2013, two bombs made from pressure cookers exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line, killing three people and injuring more than 260. Suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police; his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
In 2019, fire swept across the top of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris during renovations, causing the collapse of the cathedral’s spire and one of its landmark rectangular towers.
In 2023, the nation’s industrial output in March registered its biggest decline since the U.S. demobilized at the end of World War II as factories shut down amid the coronavirus epidemic.