April 13

1250 – The Seventh Crusade is defeated in Egypt and Louis IX of France is captured

1360 – A hail storm kills an estimated 1,000 English soldiers in Chartres, France left without shelter, during the Hundred Years’ War, on a day known as “Black Monday”

1598 – The Edict of Nantes grants political rights to the French Huguenots

1721 – First US President under the Articles of Confederation, John Hanson, is born

1732 – British Prime Minister, Frederick Lord North, is born

1742 – George Friedrich Handel’s Messiah oratorio premiers in Dublin, Ireland

1743 – Third President of the US, Thomas Jefferson, is born

1775 – Lord North extends the New England Restraining Act to South Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, forbidding trade with any country other than Britain and Ireland

1777 – General Lord Charles Cornwallis leads 4,000 British troops and Hessian mercenaries in an attack on American troops in the village of Bound Brook, New Jersey

1852 – American retailer Frank W. Woolworth is born

1860 – The first Pony Express reaches Sacramento, California

1861 – After 34 hours of bombardment, Union-held Fort Sumter surrenders to the Confederates

1864 – General Sherman’s Union forces begin their devastating march through Georgia

1866 – Outlaw and leader of the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy aka Robert LeRoy Parker, is born

1868 – Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia commits suicide when British and Indian troops capture Magdala, ending the Abyssinian War

1882 – Historian and philosopher Bruno Bauer dies

1899 – Inventor of board game Scrabble, Alfred Butts, is born

1902 – JC Penney opens its first store in Kemmerer, Wyoming

1906 – Nobel Prize-winning playwright Samuel Beckett is born

1909 – Writer Eudora Welty is born

1918 – Germany captures Helsinki, Finland

1919 – British forces kill hundreds of Indian nationalists in the Amritsar Massacre

1922 – Novelist John Gerard Braine is born

1924 – Choreographer and director Stanley Donen is born

1933 – The first flight over Mount Everest is completed by Lord Clydesdale

1938 – Author and environmentalist Grey Owl dies

1939 – Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney is born

1939 – The USS Astoria arrives in Japan in an attempt to photograph the Japanese battleships Yamato and Musashi

1941 – German troops capture Belgrade, Yugoslavia

1941 – The USSR and Japan sign a five-year neutrality agreement

1943 – Franklin Roosevelt dedicates the Jefferson Memorial

1945 – Vienna falls to Soviet troops

1945 – Adolf Hitler proclaims from an underground bunker that deliverance was at hand from encroaching Russian troops in a bluff intended to bolster morale of his troops. At the same time, soldiers, Hitler Youth and local police chase 5,000 to 6,000 Jewish prisoners into a barn and then set it on fire, to conceal evidence of their war crimes under the knowledge that the end of the Reich was fast approaching

1949 – Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens is born

1954 – Canadian politician Angus Lewis Macdonald dies

1960 – The first navigational satellite is launched into Earth’s orbit, Transit 1B

1961 – The UN General Assembly condemns South Africa because of apartheid

1963 – Russian chess player Garry Kasparov is born

1964 – Sidney Poitier becomes the first black to win an Oscar for best actor

1966 – The Southern Christian Leadership Conference adopts a resolution urging the US to “desist from aiding the military junta against the Buddhists, Catholics, and students, whose efforts to democratize their government are more in consonance with our traditions than the policy of the military oligarchy”

1970 – An oxygen tank explodes on Apollo 13, preventing a planned moon landing and putting the lives of the three crew members in grave danger

1970 – Greek composer and politician Mikis Theodorakis is freed from the concentration camp of Oropos by the right-wing military junta

1972 – Three North Vietnamese divisions attack An Loc with tanks, heavy artillery and rockets

1975 – A civil war erupts in Lebanon when gunmen kill four Christian Phalangists who retaliate by killing 27 Palestinians

1976 – The US Federal Reserve begins issuing a $2 bicentennial note

1979 – The world’s longest ping-pong match ends after 101 hours

1984 – After a month-long crime spree that led to the rape and deaths of 11 women, wealthy race-car driver Christopher Wilder shoots himself to death to avoid capture by state troopers who were moving in to capture him

1990 – The Soviet government officially accepts responsibility for the Katyn Massacre of World War II, where almost 5,000 Polish military officers were murdered and buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest

1997 – A 21-year old Tiger Woods wins the Masters by a record 12 strokes in Augusta, Georgia. The win was his first victory in a major championship and the greatest performance by a professional golfer in over a century

2004 – Barry Bonds hits his 661^st homerun, passing Willie Mays to take the third spot on the lifetime list

2009 – Former MLB all-star pitcher Mark “The Bird” Fidrych is found dead following a truck accident on his Massachusetts farm

2009 – Sportscaster Harry Kalas dies

2012 – A North Korean Earth observation satellite, Kwangmyongsong-4, explodes after launch, prompting the US and others to call the launch a violation of the UN Security Council rules