Events in History
- Apr 1 Anti-nuclear demonstrators link arms in 14-mile human chain in England
- Apr 1 Iraq increases missile attacks on Iran
- Apr 4 6th NASA Space Shuttle Mission: Challenger 1 launches
- Apr 5 France throws out 47 Soviet diplomats
- Apr 7 Oldest human skeleton, aged 80,000 years, discovered in Egypt
- Apr 7 STS-6 specialist Story Musgrave & Don Peterson perform the 1st STS spacewalk
- Apr 7 WIBC Championship Tournament in Las Vegas, attracts 75,480 women bowlers for 83-day event
- Apr 9 6th NASA Space Shuttle Mission: Challenger 1 returns to Earth
- Apr 10 Hennie Kuiper (Neth) wins Paris-Roubaix cycle race
- Apr 10 Jordan king Hussein ceases negotiations with PLO
- Apr 11 In the first 'supergrass' trial in Northern Ireland, fourteen Ulster Volunteer Force members are jailed for a total of two hundred years
- Apr 11 NASA launches RCA-F
Election of Interest
Apr 12 Harold Washington elected Chicago's 1st black mayor
- Apr 12 USSR performs nuclear test at Eastern Kazakh/Semipalitinsk USSR
- Apr 13 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
Event of Interest
Apr 14 US President Ronald Reagan signs $165 billion Social Security rescue
Event of Interest
Apr 18 Pulitzer Prize awarded to Alice Walker for the novel "The Color Purple"
- Apr 19 France performs nuclear test
- Apr 20 President Reagan signs a $165B bail out for Social Security
- Apr 20 Soyuz T-8 launched; mission aborted when capsule fails to dock (lands 2 days later)
- Apr 21 1 pound coin introduced in United Kingdom
- Apr 22 Great Britain performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
- Apr 22 Soyuz T-8 returns to Earth
- Apr 22 Stern mag announces major historical find-discovery of 60 volume personal diaries written by Adolf Hitler (turned out to be a hoax)
- Apr 24 Austrian socialist party loses parliamentary election
- Apr 25 France performs nuclear test at Mururoa atoll
- Apr 25 NASA space probe Pioneer 10 travels beyond Pluto's orbit
Election of Interest
Apr 25 Portugal's Mário Soares' Partido Socialista wins parliamentary election
Soviet History
Apr 25 Yuri Andropov invites US schoolgirl Samantha Smith to the Soviet Union
- Apr 26 Dow Jones Industrial Avg breaks 1,200 for 1st time
- Apr 28 Argentine government declares all 15-30,000 missing persons dead
- Apr 28 NASA launches Geos-F
- Apr 29 Harold Washington sworn in as Chicago's 1st African American mayor
Birthdays in History
- Apr 14 William Obeng, American football offensive lineman, born in Accra, Ghana
Alexis Ohanian (40 years old)
Apr 24 American internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Reddit, born in Brooklyn, New York
- Apr 24 Princess Iman bint Al Hussein of Jordan, daughter of King Hussein and Queen Noor of Jordan, born in Amman, Jordan
- Apr 25 DeAngelo Williams, American National Football League runningback, born in Wynne, Arkansas
- Apr 26 Jessica Lynch, American prisoner of war (served in the 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. and allied forces), born in Palestine, Wirt County, West Virginia
Deaths in History
- Apr 6 Ana Maria, Salvador guerilla leader, murdered
- Apr 10 Issam Sartawi, PLO ambassador to Portugal, murdered
- Apr 13 Christmas Humphreys, English lawyer and prominent British Buddhist (Awakening of Zen), dies at 82
- Apr 13 Mercè Rodoreda, Catalan novelist (La plaça del diamant), dies at 74
- Apr 13 Theodore Stephanides, Greek doctor & naturalist, dies at 87
- Apr 15 Corrie ten Boom, Dutch author (The Hiding Place) & Holocaust survivor, dies at 91
- Apr 15 Gyula Illyés, Hungarian author & poet (Az Ismertlen Illyes), dies at 80
- Apr 19 Jerzy Andrzejewski, Polish writer (Ashes and Diamonds), dies at 73
Authors
Civil Rights Activists
Inventors
Kings
Revolutionaries
Scientists