ON THIS DATE

Historical events from April 14 are brought to you by Encyclopaedia Britannica. Explore more at britannica.com.

2021: American hedgefund investment manager Bernie Madoff, who operated the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, died in federal prison at the age of 82.

2014: The Islamic sectarian movement Boko Haram kidnapped more than 275 girls from a boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria, sparking worldwide condemnation.

2010: Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland began sending ash plumes into the skies, disrupting air traffic for days across Europe.

2004: Bartholomew I, ecumenical patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, formally accepted the apology offered by Pope John Paul II in 2001 for the sacking of Constantinople by Crusader armies in the early 13th century.

2003: Researchers announced the end of the Human Genome Project; over the course of 13 years, they had successfully determined, stored and rendered publicly available the sequences of almost all the genetic content of the human genome.

1986: A force of U.S. warplanes based in Britain bombed several sites in Libya, killing or wounding several of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s children and narrowly missing Qaddafi himself.

1952: American author Ralph Ellison published his debut novel, Invisible Man; a bildungsroman that tells of a naive and idealistic young Black man, it is widely regarded as a classic.

1941: British film actress Julie Christie, born in India this day in 1941, was renowned for a wide range of roles in English and American films, as well as for her striking looks.

1865: On this day in 1865, just after the effective end of the American Civil War, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending a production at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and died the next morning.