April 15: What Happened on This Day in History (High_school Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1755 - Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language is published in London.
2. 1783 - Preliminary articles of peace ending the American Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence) are ratified.
3. 1817 - Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc founded the American School for the Deaf, the first American school for deaf students, in Hartford, Connecticut.
4. 1861 - President Abraham Lincoln calls for 75,000 Volunteers to quell the insurrection that soon became the American Civil War
5. 1912 - The British passenger linerRMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlanticat 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg. Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survive.
6. 1923 - Insulin becomes generally available for use by people with diabetes.
7. 1947 - Jackie Robinson debuts for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball's color line.
8. 1960 - At Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Ella Baker leads a conference that results in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the principal organizations of the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
9. 1989 - Upon Hu Yaobang's death, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 begin in the People's Republic of China.
10. 2013 - Two bombs explode near the finish line at the Boston Marathon in Boston, Massachusetts, killing 3 people and injuring 264 others.
11. Famous Birthdays: Leonardo da Vinci (Italian painter, sculptor, and architect), Leonhard Euler (Swiss mathematician and physicist), Johannes Stark (German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate), Corrie ten Boom (Dutch-American author and Holocaust survivor), Nikolaas Tinbergen (Dutch ethologist, Nobel Prize laureate)

For famous birthdays and other daily events in history, visit our Daily Dose Activities.

Click Here for Yesterday in History: April 14

Click Here for Tomorrow in History: April 16

For more history resources on Internet 4 Classrooms, visit our Social Studies and History index. For Pre K-8th Grade Level History and Social Studies Resources, visit our Grade Level Index.