26 de abril

The most powerful Maya king of his century. The Snake dynasty, which had moved its seat to Calakmul, reached the height of its power under him: kings at Dos Pilas and Cancuen took office under his authority. He reigned about fifty years. Long Count 9.10.3.5.10 8 Ok 18 Sip

The Sainte-ChapelleSainte-Chapelle

A reliquary the size of a building, for the Crown of Thorns and other Passion relics, in the courtyard of the royal palace. The upper chapel is almost all glass: fifteen tall windows and a rose tell over a thousand scenes. It cost 40,000 livres to build and glaze and was consecrated on 26 April…

Raymond of Toulouse spent his last years besieging Tripoli from a castle he built on the hill opposite, Mont Pèlerin, and died there in 1105. His son Bertrand took the city; the last crusader state to be founded, it was the second-last to fall.

Sultan Qalawun stormed Tripoli after a month’s siege; the Venetians and Genoese left by sea and the city was razed. Abu’l-Fida, a young prince of Hama, was in the Mamluk army.

At high mass in the cathedral, the Pazzi and their allies attacked Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano. Giuliano was stabbed to death; Lorenzo escaped, wounded, into the sacristy. Within hours the archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, was hanged from a window of the Palazzo della Signoria.

The parish register records “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere”, William son of John Shakspere, a glover and wool dealer who would become the town’s bailiff. His birthday is unknown. 23 April is a later guess, three days before the baptism and matching the day he died.

In a farmhouse near Durham, Joseph Johnston surrendered to Sherman about 89,000 soldiers in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, the largest surrender of the war. Washington had rejected Sherman’s first, broader terms.

Scientists and MPs pressed for a national funeral instead, and the Dean agreed. Hooker and Wallace were among the pallbearers, and Darwin was buried a few feet from Isaac Newton.

Called to settle Korea and Indochina, with Britain and the Soviet Union in the chair. The Indochina talks opened on 8 May, the day after Dien Bien Phu fell. Zhou Enlai and Moscow pressed the Viet Minh to accept less than their army had won.

Thomas Francis Jr. ran the largest medical experiment the United States had seen: about 1.8 million children, the “Polio Pioneers”, took part, and more than 600,000 were injected with vaccine or a placebo. The first shot went to six-year-old Randy Kerr at Franklin Sherman Elementary School in…

A T2 tanker with a spar deck built over her tanks took on 58 aluminium trailer bodies, 35 feet long, in under eight hours and sailed the same day, after a lunch for about a hundred officials at the port. McLean worked out what it had cost: 15.8 cents a ton to load, against $5.83 a ton for loose…

The pine wood just west of the plant took the heaviest fallout of the night. The trees died and their needles turned ginger-brown, which gave the Red Forest its name. Liquidators later bulldozed most of the pines into trenches and covered them with sand.

Firefighters from the plant and from Pripyat fought more than thirty fires on the roofs of the turbine hall and the reactor building, among lumps of graphite they had no way to recognise. By about 05:00 every fire but the one inside the reactor was out.

The commissioning engineer was carried out of a measuring room with severe burns and crushing injuries and died in Pripyat's hospital early that morning, the second death of the night.

Believing the reactor intact, as Dyatlov and the plant's managers reported to Moscow, Akimov and Toptunov spent the early morning opening valves by hand to feed it water. The water had nowhere to go; both men received fatal doses.

Boris Shcherbina, a deputy prime minister, led it; the chemist Valery Legasov of the Kurchatov Institute was its scientific voice. They soon saw what the plant's own reports had missed: the reactor was destroyed.

André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, both teenagers when they signed to LaFace, recorded with the production team Organized Noize in Rico Wade’s basement studio, the Dungeon, in East Point. Live bass and slow Southern drawl sounded like nothing out of New York.

A decade from OutKast’s first album to its Album of the Year. Houston had the Geto Boys and DJ Screw, New Orleans had bounce and the labels No Limit and Cash Money, Atlanta had OutKast, Goodie Mob and, by the end, trap. By 2004 the South was selling more rap than New York or Los Angeles.

Special votes on the 26th, then two days for everyone, with a third in parts of the country where ballots ran short. About 19.7 million votes were cast, many after hours in the queue. Inkatha joined a week before, too late for the printers: its name went on the ballot as a sticker. The ANC won…

Fighting between ANC and Inkatha supporters in Natal spread to the townships and hostels of the Reef: train massacres, night raids, assassinations. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found elements of the security forces had armed and helped Inkatha. It put the dead of 1990 to 1994 at about…

At the stroke of midnight on 27 April the old orange, white and blue flag came down and the new one went up, as the interim constitution came into force and the homelands ceased to exist. 27 April is now Freedom Day.

A film crew dug up the 1983 pit and found E.T. cartridges among many other games. James Heller, the Atari manager who had overseen the burial, said about 728,000 cartridges went in — not the millions of legend. About 1,300 were recovered and many sold at auction.

Low on fuel, Cassini dived through the gap between the planet and its rings, the first of 22 such passes. On 15 September it plunged into Saturn on purpose, so it could never contaminate Enceladus or Titan, and radioed data until it broke up.