Category: Today

On April 29, 1945, U.S. troops of the Seventh Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp.

On April 28, 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution.

On April 27, 1759, English philosopher and author Mary Wollstonecraft was born. Wollstonecraft married anarchist philosopher William Godwin and the couple begat one daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Wollstonecraft herself wrote several important political treatises, including her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and her valiant effort in the emancipation of women, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).

English philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, and political theorist Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820. Among Spencer’s most famous books are First Principles, Principles of Ethics (chiefly its first part, The Data of Ethics), The Study of Sociology, The Man versus the State, and two editions of Social Statics. Spencer was an evolutionary theorist as well as a religious and political philosopher, and coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He called the basic principle of a free political order “The Law of Equal Freedom.”

On April 26, 1777, Sibyl Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s more famous effort.

On the same day in 1805, United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, an important event in the First Barbary War.

In April 26, 1865, Union cavalry troopers cornered John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia, shooting him to death. There was no interrogation.

On April 24, 1792, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Eight years later to the day, the United States Congress approved a bill establishing the Library of Congress.

On April 23, 1968, students at New York City’s Columbia University held a demonstration to protest military research and the condemnation of part of the neighboring Morningside Heights section of Harlem to make way for a new student gymnasium. The protest escalated into a week-long occupation of five campus buildings before police moved in. Some 712 students were arrested, and over 100 injured during the forcible eviction. After the university-ordered police response, a student strike shut down the campus for the rest of the semester.