What happened on 1 April?

19 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1665 Great Plague of London Last major bubonic plague outbreak in England; killed perhaps 100,000 Londoners.
2. 1651 Hobbes's Leviathan Foundational text of modern political philosophy; argues for an absolute sovereign as the only way out of the 'war of all against all' in the state of nature.
3. 1919 Bauhaus founded in Weimar Walter Gropius's school marries craft and modern design; cradle of modernist architecture.
4. 1976 Founding of Apple Inc. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne found Apple.
5. 1939 Franco's rule of Spain Thirty-six years of dictatorship after victory in the Civil War, ending only with his death.
6. 1939 Nationalist victory in Spain Madrid falls; Franco declares victory; opens 36-year fascist-leaning dictatorship.
7. 1945 Battle of Okinawa Last major Pacific battle; ~200,000 killed including ~100,000 civilians; foreshadows expected cost of invading the Home Islands.
8. 1981 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie's Booker-winning novel of India born at independence.
9. 1572 The Sea Beggars take Brielle Expelled from English ports, the rebel privateer fleet seizes the small town of Brielle almost by accident — and the spark takes: within months most of Holland and Zeeland has decl
10. 1940 Katyn massacre Soviet NKVD executed around 22,000 Polish officers, intelligentsia and police.
11. 1933 The first anti-Jewish boycott Two months into power, SA men take up posts outside Jewish shops, doctors' surgeries and law offices with placards and cameras. The one-day national boycott is the regime's first o
12. 1734 Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques Voltaire's letters from England praising English liberty, banned in France for sedition.
13. 1520 Mutiny at Port St Julian Wintering on the desolate Patagonian coast, three of the five captains — Spaniards who despise their Portuguese commander — seize their ships on Easter night. Magellan retakes them
14. 1988 Hawking's A Brief History of Time Hawking's popular cosmology bestseller introducing black holes and the Big Bang to mass audiences.
15. 1081 Reign of Alexios I Komnenos Founder of the Komnenian restoration; requests Western aid that becomes the First Crusade.
16. 1955 Cyprus Emergency EOKA guerrillas wage an armed campaign to end British rule and unite Cyprus with Greece, ending in independence.
17. 1873 Born: Sergei Rachmaninoff Russian late-Romantic composer and virtuoso pianist.
18. 1810 Kamehameha unifies the Hawaiian Islands Kaumualii of Kauai peacefully submits to Kamehameha I, completing the unification of the Hawaiian Islands begun with the 1795 conquests of Maui, Molokai and Oahu.
19. 1999 Creation of Nunavut The map changes for the first time in fifty years: an Inuit-majority territory across a fifth of Canada, born of the largest Indigenous land claim ever settled.