On April 26, 121, Marcus Aurelius was born in Rome. He would become emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD, and write “Meditations,” which remains revered as a literary monument to the Stoic philosophy.
On April 26, 1607, English colonists made landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.
On April 26, 1933, the Gestapo, the brutal secret police force of Nazi Germany, was established.
On April 26, 1937, during the market’s busiest hour in Guernica, Spain, the Nazi Luftwaffe began an unprovoked three-hour attack aerial bombardment, which killed or wounded one-third of the city’s 5,000 residents. The indiscriminate killing of civilians at Guernica became a symbol of fascist brutality.