Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/April 15

Purge

This is a list of selected April 15 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← April 14	April 16 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (requires undeletion)

Samuel Johnson (requires undeletion)
Samuel Johnson
Hillsborough disaster memorial at Hillsborough Stadium
RMS Titanic on April 10, 1912
The Titanic's sinking, as depicted by Willy Stöwer
Hu Yaobang
YB-52
Aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing
Jackie Robinson
title="Ombra mai fù" performed by Enrico Caruso

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Father Damien Day in Hawaii;	refimprove section
1715 – The Yamasee War between colonial South Carolina and various Native American Indian tribes began.	refimprove section
1755 – A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson was first published, becoming one of the most influential dictionaries in the history of English.	refimprove section
1922 – U.S. Senator John B. Kendrick introduced a resolution calling for an investigation of a secret land deal, which led to the discovery of the Teapot Dome scandal.	refimprove section
1936 – The Great Arab Revolt in the British Mandate for Palestine began when unknown assailants attacked a convoy of trucks and killed two of the Jewish drivers.	unreferenced section
1941 – Second World War: Two hundred bombers of the German Luftwaffe attacked Belfast, Northern Ireland, killing about 1,000 people and rendering roughly 100,000 others homeless.	needs more footnotes
1955 – American restaurateur Ray Kroc opened the ninth McDonald's franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois, an occasion considered to be the founding of the present corporation.	globalize, expansion
1986 – U.S. armed forces began bombing Libya to try to reduce that country's ability to support international terrorism.	refimprove section
1989 – The death of former Chinese General Secretary Hu Yaobang triggered a series of events that led to the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.	refimprove section

Eligible

769 – The Lateran Council concluded proceedings intended to rectify abuses in the papal electoral process that had led to the elevation of the antipopes Constantine II and Philip.
1638 – A rebellion by Catholic Japanese peasants in Shimabara over increased taxes was put down by the Tokugawa shogunate, resulting in greater enforcement of the policy of national seclusion.
1738 – Serse, an opera by Baroque composer George Frideric Handel loosely based on Xerxes I of Persia, premiered in London.
1912 – More than 1,500 people died after the passenger liner RMS Titanic sank as a result of colliding with an iceberg southeast of Newfoundland.
1927 – Torrential rains caused the Mississippi River to break out of its levee system in at least 145 places, resulting in the worst flooding in the history of the United States.
1936 – A group of Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine killed two Jews at a roadblock, an act widely viewed as the beginning of the violence within the Arab revolt.
1947 – Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the baseball color line, played his first game in Major League Baseball.
1952 – The B-52 Stratofortress, a long-range, subsonic, jet-powered, strategic bomber operated by the United States Air Force for most of the aircraft's history, made its first flight.
1958 – On Walter O'Malley's initiative, the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants played in the first Major League Baseball game on the U.S. West Coast.
1989 – A human crush during an FA Cup semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, caused 96 deaths, making it the worst disaster in British sporting history.
2001 – India and Bangladesh began a six-day conflict over their disputed border, which ended in a stalemate.
2013 – Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev set off two pressure cooker bombs during the running of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 264 others.
Born/died: Richard Poore (d. 1237) | Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452) | Guru Arjan (b. 1563) | George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (d. 1632) | Leonhard Euler (b. 1707) | Mikhail Lomonosov (d. 1765) | Abraham Lincoln (d. 1865) | Wilhelm Busch (b. 1832) | Richard von Weizsäcker (b. 1920) | Claudia Cardinale (b. 1938) | Hugh Thompson Jr. (b. 1943) | Emma Thompson (b. 1959) | Arsenio Lacson (d. 1962) | Dara Torres (b. 1967) | Milton Bradley (b. 1978) | Seth Rogen (b. 1982) | Emma Watson (b. 1990)

Notes

Messiah (Handel) appears on April 13 so the Serse blurb should not appear in the same year.
Noah Webster appears on April 14 so the Dictionary blurb should not appear in the same year.
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln appears on April 14, so Abraham Lincoln should not appear in the same year.

April 15: Day of the Sun in North Korea

Notre-Dame de Paris, with its spire and roof aflame

1071 – Byzantine–Norman wars: After a siege of almost three years, Italo-Norman forces conquered the city of Bari, the capital of the Catepanate of Italy, ending more than five centuries of Byzantine presence in the region.
1802 – English poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy encountered a "long belt" of daffodils while walking around Ullswater in the Lake District, inspiring him to pen his best-known work, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud".
1994 – At a GATT ministerial meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco, representatives of 123 countries and the European Communities signed an agreement to establish the World Trade Organization.
2019 – A fire (pictured) severely damaged the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, destroying the building's timber spire and much of its roof.

Robert Persons (d. 1610)
Stanley Bruce (b. 1883)
Greta Garbo (d. 1990)

More anniversaries: