Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/April 26

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This is a list of selected April 26 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Before doing so, please review the selected anniversaries guidelines. If your suggestion is potentially controversial or relates to a day currently or soon to appear on the Main Page, post it on the talk page instead.

Please note:

Events listed on the Main Page are selected based on article quality and to provide a diverse range of topics, rather than solely on the importance or significance of the events.
Only four or five events are featured each day; therefore, not all important or significant events can be included.
An event is generally excluded if it is already the subject of the scheduled featured article, featured list or picture of the day.

To report an error in content currently on the Main Page, see Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors. If a listed event is inaccurate, please first seek consensus and update the corresponding article before making changes here.

← April 25	April 27 →

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Images

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Boston Corbett, the US Army soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth
Flag of Tanzania
Paul von Hindenburg
SS emblem
Statue of Sybil Ludington
B&O Royal Blue
Lorenzo de' Medici

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
; Feast day of Our Lady of Good Counsel (Roman Catholic Church)	refimprove section
; Arbor Day in the United States (2013)	refimprove
1925 – Paul von Hindenburg defeated Wilhelm Marx in the second round of the German presidential election, becoming the first directly elected head of state of the Weimar Republic.	refimprove, too long section
1945 – World War II: Both the German and Polish–Soviet sides claimed victory as major fighting in the Battle of Bautzen ended.	claims of victory on this day not mentioned
1956 – SS Ideal X set sail from Port Newark in New Jersey as the part of world's first successful container shipping business.	Ideal X: stub; Container ship: refimprove section; Containerization: more sources needed
1981 – Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco performed the world's first human open fetal surgery.	refimprove
1982 – In one of the deadliest spree killings in modern history, South Korean police officer Woo Bum-kon killed a total of 57 people in one night, including himself.	refimprove section
1983 – Cold War: Replying to her letter in which she expressed her fears about the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov invited American schoolgirl Samantha Smith to visit Moscow, Leningrad and the Artek Young Pioneer camp.	appears on July 7
2012 – The International Hydrographic Organization abandoned South Korean-led 'attempts to rename the Sea of Japan.	date not in the article
World Intellectual Property Day	Undercited section

Eligible

1478 – In a conspiracy to replace the Medici family as rulers of the Republic of Florence, the Pazzi family attacked Lorenzo de' Medici (pictured) and killed his brother Giuliano at Florence Cathedral.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: Sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington allegedly rode forty miles (64 km) through the night to warn militiamen under her father Henry's command that British troops were planning to invade Danbury, Connecticut.
1865 – U.S. Army soldiers cornered and fatally shot John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, ending a twelve-day manhunt.
1915 – First World War: Britain, France and Russia signed a secret treaty promising territory to Italy if it joined the war on their side.
1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, was established.
1944 – World War II: U.S. Navy submarines began attacks on Japan's Take Ichi convoy as it sailed in waters between Taiwan and the Philippines, eventually sinking four vessels and killing more than 4,000 troops.
1937 – Spanish Civil War: The Bombing of Guernica by the Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe resulted in a devastating firestorm that caused widespread destruction and civilian deaths and inspired one of Pablo Picasso's most famous paintings.
1958 – Service ended on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue Line, one of the first major electrified train lines in the U.S. (steam train pictured).
1964 – Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania with Julius Nyerere as its first president.
1970 – The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) came into being when the WIPO Convention entered into force.
1989 – An editorial was published in the People's Daily denouncing the growing unrest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing which would remain contentious through the remainder of the protests.
1989 – A tornado struck the Manikganj District of Bangladesh and killed an estimated 1,300 people, making it the deadliest tornado in history.
1999 – The CIH virus activated widely, damaging hundreds of thousands of computers and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
1994 – Just before landing at Nagoya Airport, Japan, the copilot of China Airlines Flight 140 inadvertently triggered the takeoff/go-around switch, causing the aircraft to crash and killing 264 of the 271 people on board.
2002 – An expelled student murdered sixteen people and wounded seven others before committing suicide at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium Erfurt in Erfurt, Germany.
2007 – Controversy surrounding the relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, a Soviet Red Army World War II memorial in Tallinn, Estonia, erupted into mass protests and riots.
Born/died: | Marcus Aurelius |b|121| Chen Jingxuan |d|893| Jean Fernel |d|1558|Samuel Bellamy |d|1717| Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily |b|1782| Nano Nagle |d|1784| Alice Ayres |d|1885| Ludwig Wittgenstein |b|1889| Hack Wilson |b|1900| I. M. Pei |b|1917| Srinivasa Ramanujan |d|1920| Margaret Scott |b|1922| Anne McLaren |b|1927| Giorgio Moroder |b|1940| Morihei Ueshiba |d|1969| Alex Sobel |b|1975| S. J. V. Chelvanayakam |d|1977| Scott Brown |b|1985|

Notes

Assassination of Abraham Lincoln appears on April 14, so John Wilkes Booth should not appear in the same year.

April 26

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant

1803 – Thousands of meteor fragments fell over L'Aigle, France, becoming a milestone in the understanding of meteorites.
1941 – Boris Kidrič and Edvard Kardelj founded the Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation, the main anti-fascist Slovene civil-resistance and political organization during World War II.
1986 – The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (pictured) near Chernobyl, Ukrainian SSR, suffered a steam explosion, resulting in a fire, a nuclear meltdown, and the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people around Europe.
2017 – The Shandong was launched for the People's Liberation Army Navy, China's first domestically built aircraft carrier.

Ma Rainey (b. 1886)
Margaret Gowing (b. 1921)
Arnold Sommerfeld (d. 1951)
Thiago Almada (b. 2001)

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