April 3

The Confederate government fled overnight, and fires set to destroy supplies burned the business district. Black troops of the XXV Corps were among the first Union soldiers in. Lincoln walked the streets the next day.

Greek Independence Day by the Julian calendar Greece still used: 25 March, which was 6 April in Paris. About 240 men from fourteen nations competed in a stadium rebuilt in marble on its ancient site. The first champion was an American, James Connolly, in the triple jump.

Held in the ice with her rudder smashed, the ship drifted north out of the Ross Sea for more than ten months under Joseph Stenhouse. She cleared the pack on 14 March 1916 and reached Port Chalmers under a jury rudder, in tow of a tug.

Germany let 32 Russian émigrés, Lenin among them, cross its territory from Switzerland in a carriage treated as extraterritorial, hoping they would take Russia out of the war. The journey ran by rail to the Baltic, by ferry to Sweden and round the Gulf of Bothnia to Finland: eight days. It starts…

At 23:10 local time. Welcomed in the old imperial waiting room by Chkheidze, who hoped for unity among socialists, Lenin turned to the crowd and hailed the worldwide socialist revolution. He spoke again from the top of an armoured car.

Two Westland biplanes paid for by Lady Houston flew from Purnea in India and passed about 100 feet over the summit at about 10.05 a.m. The pilots were the Marquess of Clydesdale and David McIntyre; the observers, Stewart Blacker and the cameraman Sidney Bonnett, breathed oxygen through masks. They…

The SCLC’s “Project C” (for confrontation) took on the city King called the most segregated in America, with sit-ins, marches and a boycott of downtown stores. It ended with an agreement to desegregate lunch counters and hire Black clerks; the next night bombs hit King’s brother’s house and the…

I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. — King On a stormy night King spoke without notes to strikers and their supporters at Mason Temple. It was his last speech.

On a New York pavement, Motorola’s Martin Cooper used a prototype DynaTAC weighing about 1.1 kilograms to phone his rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel, and tell him where he was calling from. The battery lasted about 30 minutes.

A specially adapted TGV with bigger wheels and extra power on the new LGV Est set the speed record for a train on conventional rails, which still stands. A Japanese maglev, which floats above a guideway instead of running on rails, had already reached 581 in 2003.

BYD said it had ended production of cars that run only on petrol or diesel in March, the first major carmaker to do so. From then on it made only battery-electric cars and plug-in hybrids.