April 20

What happened that day?

• 2015: 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.
• 2013: A 6.6-magnitude earthquake strikes Lushan County, Ya'an, in China's Sichuan province, killing more than 150 people and injuring thousands.
• 2012: One hundred twenty-seven people are killed when a plane crashes in a residential area near the Benazir Bhutto International Airport near Islamabad, Pakistan.
• 2010: The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning an oil spill that would last six months.
• 2008: Danica Patrick wins the Indy Japan 300 becoming the first female driver in history to win an Indy car race.
• 2007: [Johnson Space Center](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Space_Center) shooting: William Phillips with a handgun barricades himself in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas before killing a male hostage and himself.
• 1999: [Columbine High School](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School) massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and injured 24 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
• 1972: Apollo 16, commanded by John Young, lands on the moon.
• 1968: English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial Rivers of Blood speech.
• 1961: Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
• 1946: The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the United Nations.
• 1945: Twenty Jewish children used in medical experiments at Neuengamme are killed in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school.
• 1945: World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
• 1945: World War II: US troops capture Leipzig, Germany, only to later cede the city to the Soviet Union.
• 1922: The Soviet government creates South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast within Georgian SSR.
• 1918: 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.
• 1916: The Chicago Cubs play their first game at Weeghman Park (currently Wrigley Field), defeating the Cincinnati Reds 7-6 in 11 innings.
• 1914: Nineteen men, women, and children die in the Ludlow Massacre during a Colorado coal-miner's strike.
• 1912: Opening day for baseball's Tiger Stadium in Detroit, and Fenway Park in Boston.
• 1908: Opening day of competition in the New South Wales Rugby League.
• 1902: Pierre and Marie Curie refine radium chloride.
• 1898: President William McKinley signed a joint resolution to Congress for declaration of War against Spain, beginning the Spanish-American War.
• 1884: Pope Leo XIII publishes the encyclical Humanum genus.
• 1876: The April Uprising begins. Its suppression shocks European opinion, and Bulgarian independence becomes a condition for ending the Russo-Turkish War.
• 1865: Astronomer Angelo Secchi demonstrates the Secchi disk, which measures water clarity, aboard Pope Pius IX's yacht, the L'Immaculata Concezion.
• 1862: Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard complete the experiment falsifying the theory of spontaneous generation.
• 1861: American Civil War: Robert E. Lee resigns his commission in the United States Army in order to command the forces of the state of Virginia.
• 1836: U.S. Congress passes an act creating the Wisconsin Territory.
• 1828: René Caillié becomes the second non-Muslim to enter, and the first to return from, Timbuktu, following Major Gordon Laing.
• 1826: Major Gordon Laing becomes the first non-Muslim to enter Timbuktu.
• 1818: The case of Ashford v Thornton ends, with Abraham Thornton allowed to go free rather than face a retrial for murder, after his demand for trial by battle is upheld.
• 1810: The Governor of Caracas declares independence from Spain.
• 1809: Two Austrian army corps in Bavaria are defeated by a First French Empire army led by Napoleon at the Battle of Abensberg on the second day of a four-day campaign that ended in a French victory.
• 1800: The Septinsular Republic is established.
• 1792: France declares war against the "King of Hungary and Bohemia", the beginning of French Revolutionary Wars.
• 1789: George Washington arrives at Grays Ferry, Philadelphia while en route to Manhattan for his inauguration.
• 1775: American Revolutionary War: The Siege of Boston begins, following the battles at Lexington and Concord.
• 1770: The Georgian king, Erekle II, abandoned by his Russian ally Count Totleben, wins a victory over Ottoman forces at Aspindza.
• 1752: Start of Konbaung-Hanthawaddy War, a new phase in the Burmese Civil War (1740-57).
• 1689: Deposed monarch James II of England lays siege to Derry.
• 1657: Freedom of religion is granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam (later New York City).
• 1657: Admiral Robert Blake destroys a Spanish silver fleet under heavy fire at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
• 1653: Oliver Cromwell dissolves the Rump Parliament.
• 1535: The sun dog phenomenon observed over Stockholm and depicted in the famous painting Vädersolstavlan.
• 1534: Jacques Cartier begins his first voyage to what is today the east coast of Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador.
• 1453: Three Genoese galleys and a Byzantine blockade runner fight their way through an Ottoman blockading fleet a few weeks before the fall of Constantinople.
• 1303: The Sapienza University of Rome is instituted by Pope Boniface VIII.