TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Sunday, April 14, the 105th day of 2024. There are 261 days left in the year. On this date in:
The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first American abolition society, was founded in Philadelphia. The organization reorganized to what is better known as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and had elected Benjamin Franklin as its president in 1785.
Noah Webster’s “An American Dictionary of the English Language” was first published. The dictionary took Webster over two decades to complete and was among the first to include American specific words.
John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln in the head by while Lincoln was watching the play “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln succumbed to his injuries the next day.
James Cash Penney opened his dry-goods store named The Golden Rule in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The store sold necessities for the then-burgeoning coal mining town. Penney would later rename the store using his own namesake and the retail giant was born.
Despite receiving six different warnings of dangerous sea ice, the ocean liner RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg at 23:40 ship’s time (11:40 p.m.) in the North Atlantic.
Dubbed “Black Sunday,” one of the most devastating Dust Bowl-era storms in the 1930s swept across Oklahoma and Texas, with winds so high that it kicked up clouds of dirt and dust, darkening the sky.
American literature classic “The Grapes of Wrath” was published. Author Johnathan Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prizewinning epic told the story of a family migrating across the country to California from Oklahoma during the Great Depression.
– Hoang Tran, USA TODAY Network