On This Day for April 19 - American Revolution begun, Charles Darwin is featured, and more

Created: 2020-04-19 10:02 Updated: 2020-04-19 10:02 Notebook: On this Day in History

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April 19

FEATURED BIOGRAPHY

Charles Darwin

FEATURED EVENT

1775

American Revolution begun

MORE EVENTS ON THIS DAY

2018: King Mswati III announced that he was changing his country's name from the Kingdom of Swaziland to the Kingdom of Eswatini. [Can you match these African leaders to the countries they led?]

2005: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected to succeed Pope John Paul II, who had died some two weeks earlier; Ratzinger took the name Benedict XVI. [ Take our quiz about popes.]

1995: In what was the worst act of terrorism in U.S. history up to that time, a truck bomb nearly destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City , Oklahoma, killing 168 and injuring more than 500 people.

1993: After a 51-day standoff with U.S. federal agents, some 80 members of the millennialist Branch Davidian religious group perished in a fire at their compound near Waco , Texas.

1975: Aryabhata, the first uncrewed Earth satellite built by India, was launched from the Soviet Union by a Russian-made rocket. [ Sort fact from fiction in our space objects quiz.]

1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an act of resistance by Polish Jews under Nazi occupation, began this day and was quelled four weeks later, on May 16. [ Test your knowledge of World War II.]

SEE ALL EVENTS ON THIS DAY

ALSO BORN ON THIS DAY

1957

Mukesh Ambani
Indian businessman

1987

Maria Sharapova
Russian tennis player

1935

Dudley Moore
British actor, comedian, and musician

1972

Rivaldo
Brazilian athlete

1903

Eliot Ness
American crime fighter