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 this date in 1777, according to a widely accepted account from the American Revolutionary War, 16-yearold Sybil Ludington, the eldest child of Col. Henry Ludington, a militia commander in Dutchess County, N.Y., rode her horse into the night to alert her father’s men of the approach of British regular troops who were sacking Danbury, Conn. (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.)
In 1607, English colonists went ashore at present-day Cape Henry, Va., on an expedition to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere. In 1865, John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was surrounded by federal troops near Port Royal, Va., and killed.
In 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 antiSemitic mob in 1915.)
In 1923, Britain’s Prince Albert, Duke of York (the future King George VI), married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
In 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.
In 1945, Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France’s Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.
In 1952, the destroyer-minesweeper USS Hobson sank in the central Atlantic after colliding with the aircraft carrier USS Wasp with the loss of 176 crew members.
In 1964, the African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania.
In 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 is believed to number in the thousands.)