According to official records and all the respectable historians, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun — after being married for less than 40 hours — committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Nevertheless, rumors about Hitler’s survival in South America, until the 1960s, continue.
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 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.”
Wollstonecraft married anarchist philosopher and bookseller William Godwin; the couple begat one daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Mary Wollstonecraft died on September 10, 1797.
Spencer never married, dying on December 8, 1903.
On April 26, 1777, Sybil 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.
Sybil’s story first appeared in Martha J. Lamb’s History of the City of New York (1880), based on Ludington family oral history, twenty years after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow commemorated Revere in “Paul Revere’s Ride,” a once-popular and quite famous poem. Sybil was commemorated on an 8-cent U.S. Postage Stamp in 1975.
Actual evidence for Miss Ludington’s adventure is slim to none, however.
On April 25, 1792, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
The United States Library of Congress was established on April 24, 1800, when President John Adams signed legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.”
Du Hirte Israel, höre (“You Shepherd of Israel, hear”), BWV 104, a church cantata, was performed for the first time in Leipzig 301 years ago on April 23rd, the composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, conducting.
On April 22, 1864, the United States Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1864 that permitted the inscription In God We Trust be placed on all coins minted as currency.
April 21, 753 BC, is the traditional date on which Romulus founded Rome.
April 21, AD 1789, John Adams was sworn in as first Vice President of the United States nine days before George Washington was sworn in as President.
In 1962 on this date, the Seattle World’s Fair opened — the first World’s Fair in the United States since World War II. Three years later, to the day, the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair opened for its second and final season.