20. April

Months before the princes were ready, the preacher Peter the Hermit led tens of thousands of mostly poor pilgrims out of Cologne, down the Danube and to Constantinople, where Alexios ferried them across the Bosporus to be rid of them.

The astrologer Simon Forman wrote down the plots of plays he saw at the Globe: Macbeth on Saturday 20 April, The Winter’s Tale on 15 May, and Cymbeline. He dated the first to 1610, but 20 April was a Saturday only in 1611.

The Assembly declared war on Austria with only a handful of votes against. Prussia, Britain, the Dutch Republic, Spain and others joined; five years later France held Belgium and the Rhineland and only Britain was still fighting.

Soldiers of the Finland Regiment marched on the Mariinsky Palace, then the government’s seat, with banners calling for Milyukov’s resignation. Rival crowds clashed on Nevsky Prospekt the next day and a few people were killed.

Belgium held the Games in a war-damaged country, without the defeated powers, who were not invited. The five-ring flag flew for the first time, an athlete took the first Olympic oath, and doves were released at the opening.

Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, wrote the poem about lynching after seeing a photograph of one. Holiday sang it at Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York’s first integrated nightclub, where service stopped and the room went dark for it. Her label, Columbia, would not…

Rather than give evidence and be cross-examined, he read a statement from the dock for more than three hours: he had helped found Umkhonto we Sizwe, and he said why. He ended: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal…

François Mitterrand and Lech Wałęsa led the ceremony that moved both coffins from Sceaux. She was the first woman laid in the Panthéon for her own achievements.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, which travels from Cuvier’s mastodons to dying frogs and coral reefs, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Since November 2023 Voyager 1 had been sending gibberish. The team at JPL traced it to one failed memory chip and moved the code around it. Each command took about 22 and a half hours to arrive.