On This Day:
Saturday April 26, 2014 This is the 116th day of the year, with 249 days remaining in 2014. Fact of the Day: Robert E. Lee Robert E. Lee, Confederate general during the Civil War, was first offered command of a new army being formed to force the seceded Southern states back into the Union. While he was against slavery and secession, Lee's loyalty was to Virginia and he could not take part in a war against the Southern states. So he turned down the Union offer and accepted the Confederate position instead, having served for 36 years in the U.S. army before resigning at the beginning of the Civil War. After the war, Lee accepted the post of president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). After, his death, his son sued the United States government for illegally seizing his father's plantation, Arlington House, during the war; the plantation had become part of Arlington National Cemetery. He won the suit and the government paid him $150,000 for the property.
Holidays Feast day of St. Cletus, St. Riquier, St. Stephen of Perm, St. Peter of Braga, St. Franca of Piacenza, and St. Paschasius Radbertus.
Tanzania: Union Day.
United States: Confederate Memorial Day in southern U.S. (esp. Florida, Georgia).
Events 1514 - Copernicus made his first observations of Saturn.
1607 - A group of English colonists, including Captain John Smith, went ashore at Cape Henry, Virginia, to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
1921 - Weather broadcasts were heard for the first time on radio, WEW in St. Louis, Missouri.
1937 - During the Spanish Civil War, German planes attacked the sleeping town of Guernica in Northern Spain. This intervention by Nazi Germany in the Spanish Civil War has been described as practice for World War II.
1941 - The first organ was played at a baseball stadium, in Chicago.
1964 - The African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania. Pemba also became part of Tanzania.
1968 - The largest underground nuclear device ever to be tested in the U.S. was exploded in Nevada.
1986 - The worst nuclear power plant accident in history occurred when an explosion and fire at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union killed 32 people and sent radioactivity into the atmosphere.
1992 - Worshippers celebrated Russian Orthodox Easter for the first time in 74 years in Moscow.
1994 - More than 22 million South Africans turned out to cast ballots in the country's first multiracial parliamentary elections, choosing anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela to head a new coalition government.
2000 - Vermont governor Howard Dean signed the nation's first bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions.
2005 - Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troops from Lebanon, ending its 29-year military occupation.
Births 121 - Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor.
1785 - John Audubon, American ornithologist, naturalist, artist.
1822 - Frederick Law Olmsted, American landscape architect, designer of Central Park in New York City, Yosemite National Park, and others.
1889 - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher.
1900 - Charles Richter, American seismologist who helped develop the Richter scale.
1936 - Carol Burnett, American Emmy Award-winning entertainer, comedienne.
Deaths 1865 - John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, by federal troops near Bowling Green, Virginia.
1984 - Count Basie (born William Basie), American musician and composer.
1986 - Broderick Crawford, American actor.
1989 - Lucille Ball, American comedienne and actress.
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