TODAY IN HISTORY

FRIDAY APR 15, 2022

1912

The British luxury liner RMS Titanic foundered in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland more than 2 1⁄2 hours after hitting an iceberg; 1,514 people died, while less than half as many survived.

1865

President Abraham Lincoln died nine hours after being shot the night before by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington; Andrew Johnson became the nation’s 17th president.

1892

General Electric Co., formed by the merger of the Edison Electric Light Co. and other firms, was incorporated in Schenectady, New York.

1945

During World War II, British and Canadian troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-belsen. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died on April 12, was buried at the Roosevelt family home in Hyde Park, New York.

1947

Jackie Robinson, baseball’s first Black major league player of the modern era, made his official debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on opening day at Ebbets Field.

1955

Ray Kroc opened the first franchised Mcdonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois.

1974

Members of the Symbionese Liberation Army held up a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco; a member of the group was SLA kidnap victim Patricia Hearst, who by this time was going by the name “Tania”.

1989

96 people died in a crush of soccer fans at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England. Students in Beijing launched a series of prodemocracy protests; the demonstrations culminated in a government crackdown at Tiananmen Square.

1998

Pol Pot, the notorious leader of the Khmer Rouge, died at age 72, evading prosecution for the deaths of 2 million Cambodians.

2009

Whipped up by conservative commentators and bloggers, tens of thousands of protesters staged “tea parties” around the country to tap into the collective angst stirred up by a bad economy, government spending and bailouts.

2020

The government reported that the nation’s industrial output in March registered its biggest decline since the U.S. demobilized at the end of World War II as factories shut down amid the coronavirus epidemic.