On April 15, 1452, Leonardo da Vinci was born in Anchiano, Italy.
In 1817 the first American school for the deaf was opened, in Hartford, Conn.
In 1843 novelist Henry James was born in New York.
In 1861, three days after the Confederate attack on Ft. Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln declared a state of insurrection and called up Union troops.
In 1889 A. Philip Randolph, a labor leader and an early leader of the civil rights movement, was born in Crescent City, Fla.
In 1894 blues singer Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tenn.
In 1922 Harold Washington, later Chicago’s first black mayor, was born in Cook County Hospital.
In 1945 allied troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.
In 1947 Jackie Robinson became modern baseball’s first black major-league player, with the Brooklyn Dodgers (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
In 1955 Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald’s, in Des Plaines.
In 1967 a jury convicted Richard Speck in the July 1966 murders of eight student nurses in their South Side dormitory.
In 1980 philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, 74, died in Paris.
In 1990 actress Greta Garbo, 84, died in New York.
In 2001 Joey Ramone, 49, lead singer of the punk band the Ramones, died in New York.
In 2002 retired Supreme Court Justice Byron White, 84, died in Denver.
