On This Day for April 22 - First Earth Day, Miguel de Cervantes is featured, and more

Created: 2020-04-22 10:02 Updated: 2020-04-22 10:02 Notebook: On this Day in History

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April 22

FEATURED BIOGRAPHY

Miguel de Cervantes

FEATURED EVENT

1970

First Earth Day

MORE EVENTS ON THIS DAY

2016: More than 170 countries signed the Paris Agreement on climate change, a landmark treaty that sought to control and reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere; it took effect in November 2016. [Is climate change real?]

2004: American football player Pat Tillman, who had left his lucrative NFL career to enlist in the army following the September 11 attacks, died in Afghanistan; although initial reports claimed he was killed by enemy forces, it was eventually revealed that he had died in a friendly-fire incident.

1994: Former U.S. president Richard M. Nixon, who was the first American president to resign from office, died. [Take our U.S. presidents quiz.]

1937: American actor Jack Nicholson—one of the most prominent motion-picture actors of his generation, especially noted for his versatile portrayals of unconventional, alienated outsiders—was born. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about movie actors.]

1915: During World War I, German forces introduced the systematized use of chemical warfare when they released chlorine gas along a 4-mile (6-km) front at the Second Battle of Ypres. [ Take our quiz about wartime Germany.]

1904: American theoretical physicist and science administrator J. Robert Oppenheimer, who served as director of the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico during development of the atomic bomb, was born. [ Watch U.S. B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.]

SEE ALL EVENTS ON THIS DAY

ALSO BORN ON THIS DAY

1870

Vladimir Lenin
prime minister of Soviet Union

1937

Jack Nicholson
American actor

1724

Immanuel Kant
German philosopher

1904

J. Robert Oppenheimer
American physicist

1982

Kaká
Brazilian football player