ON APRIL 24 ...
In 1792, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, a young French military officer, wrote the words and music to “La Marseillaise,” which would become his country’s national anthem.
In 1815 novelist Anthony Trollope (“The Warden,” “Barchester Towers”) was born in London.
In 1877 federal troops were ordered out of New Orleans, ending the North’s postCivil War rule in the South.
In 1898 Spain declared war on the U.S. after rejecting America’s ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.
In 1904 abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
In 1905 Robert Penn Warren, the first poet laureate of the United States, was born in Guthrie, Ky.
In 1915 the Ottoman Turkish Empire began the mass deportation of Armenians during World War I.
In 1916 about 1,600 Irish nationalists in Dublin began the Easter Rebellion, an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow quashed several days later.
In 1934 actress Shirley MacLaine was born in Richmond, Va.
In 1942 Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was born. Also in 1942 singer-actress Barbra Streisand was born in New York City.
In 1944 the United Negro College Fund was incorporated.
In 1953 British statesman Winston Churchill was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1962 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology accomplished the first satellite relay of a television signal, between Camp Parks, Calif., and Westford, Mass.
In 1968 leftist students at Columbia University in New York began a weeklong occupation of several campus buildings.
In 1970 China launched its first satellite.
In 1974 Bud Abbott, the straight man of the Abbott and Costello comedy team, died in Woodland Hills, Calif.; he was 78.
In 1980 the United States launched an abortive attempt to free the American hostages in Iran; eight U.S. servicemen were killed.
In 1986 the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, the twice-divorced, American-born Duchess of Windsor for whom England’s King Edward VIII gave up his throne, died in Paris; she was 89.
In 1988 three American sailors were killed and 22 injured in a fire aboard the submarine Bonefish off the Florida coast.
In 1993 the Irish Republican
Army acknowledged it had planted a bomb that exploded in London’s financial district, causing one death and 45 injuries. A 500-year-old church was destroyed and many buildings damaged.
In 1996 the main assembly of the Palestine Liberation Organization voted to revoke clauses in its charter that called for an armed struggle to destroy Israel.
In 2001 the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that police can arrest and handcuff people for minor traffic offenses. Also in 2001 Rev. Leon Sullivan, a pioneering civil rights crusader credited with helping end South Africa’s system of apartheid, died in Scottsdale, Ariz.; he was 78.
In 2002, after a meeting in the Vatican, American Roman Catholic leaders agreed to make it easier to remove priests who are guilty of sexually abusing minors.
In 2003 North Korea announced that it has nuclear weapons and would test, export or use them depending on U.S. actions, according to a senior U.S. official. Also in 2003 U.S. forces in Iraq took custody of Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister.
In 2004 cosmetics icon Estee Lauder died in New York; she was 97.
In 2005 Pope Benedict XVI took over as leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Also in 2005 former Israeli president Ezer Weizman died in Caesarea, Israel; he was 80.
In 2013 an eight-story building housing five apparel factories collapsed, killing more than 1,040 people and injuring 2,500 others, outside the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka.