TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Wednesday, April 26, the 116th day of 2017. There are 249 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History
On April 26, 1777, according to a widely accepted account from the American Revolutionary War, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington, the eldest child of Col. Henry Ludington, a militia commander in Dutchess County, New York, rode her horse into the night to alert her father’s men of the approach of British regular troops who were sacking Danbury, Connecticut. (Ludington, sometimes referred to as “the female Paul Revere,” was said to have covered 40 miles, more than twice the distance of the Boston silversmith’s ride.)
On this date
1607 — English colonists went ashore at present-day Cape Henry, Virginia, on an expedition to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere. 1865 — John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was surrounded by federal troops near Port Royal, Virginia, and killed. 1913 — Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old worker at a Georgia pencil factory, was strangled; Leo Frank, the factory superintendent, was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death. (Frank’s death sentence was commuted, but he was lynched by an anti-Semitic mob in 1915.) 1937 — German and Italian warplanes raided the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War; estimates of the number of people killed vary from the hundreds to the thousands. 1952 — The USS Hobson sank in the central Atlantic after colliding with the USS Wasp with the loss of 176 crew members. 1964 — The African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania. 1972 — The first Lockheed L-1011 TriStar went into commercial service with Eastern Airlines. 1986 — An explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine caused radioactive fallout to begin spewing into the atmosphere. (Dozens of people were killed in the immediate aftermath of the disaster while the long-term death toll from radiation poisoning is believed to number in the thousands.) 1994 — Voting began in South Africa’s first allrace elections, resulting in victory for the African National Congress and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president. 2001 — Rome hosts the Georgia Cities Foundation as part of a 12-city, three-day bus tour organized to recognize downtown revitalization successes throughout the state of Georgia.
Today’s Birthdays
Architect I.M. Pei is 100. Actress-comedian Carol Burnett is 84. Actor Giancarlo Esposito is 59. Rock musician Roger Taylor (Duran Duran) is 57. Actress Joan Chen is 56. Rock musician Chris Mars is 56. Actor Jet Li is 54. Actor-comedian Kevin James is 52. Country musician Joe Caverlee (Yankee Grey) is 49. Rapper T-Boz (TLC) is 47. First lady Melania Trump is 47. Actress Jordana Brewster is 37. Actor Channing Tatum is 37. Actress Emily Wickersham is 33.