What happened on 15 April?

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

1. 1989 Tiananmen Square protests Pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing crushed by the People's Liberation Army.
2. 1912 Sinking of the Titanic RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg and sinks on her maiden voyage; over 1,500 die.
3. 2023 Sudan civil war (2023) War between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces causes widespread deaths and displaces millions of people.
4. 1762 Rousseau's The Social Contract Treatise grounding political legitimacy in the general will.
5. 1843 Born: Henry James American-born novelist; psychological realism.
6. 1874 First Impressionist exhibition Rejected by the Salon, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot and Cézanne show at the photographer Nadar's former studio; a hostile critic names them after Monet's Impression, Sun
7. 1865 Presidency of Andrew Johnson Reconstruction battles with Congress; first president impeached.
8. 2019 Notre-Dame de Paris fire Spire and roof of the medieval cathedral burn; the restored cathedral reopens in December 2024.
9. 1945 British troops enter Bergen-Belsen Handed over under local truce because typhus is loose, Belsen is the first major camp the British see: 60,000 dying prisoners and thousands of unburied dead. Richard Dimbleby's bro
10. 1563 Born: Guru Arjan Fifth Sikh guru; compiled the Adi Granth.
11. 1980 Mariel boatlift 125,000 Cubans flee to Florida in a six-month boatlift.
12. 1996 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chaired by Archbishop Tutu, the TRC trades amnesty for truth: perpetrators of political crimes confess in public, on television, in front of their victims, and walk free. Imperfect
13. 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language Samuel Johnson's landmark dictionary, the pre-eminent English dictionary for over a century until the Oxford English Dictionary.
14. 1947 Jackie Robinson breaks the colour line Robinson becomes the first Black player in modern Major League Baseball, a landmark of the US civil-rights story.
15. 1452 Mehmed builds Rumeli Hisarı In under five months the young sultan builds a great fortress at the narrowest point of the Bosphorus, opposite Anadolu Hisarı, built by his great-grandfather Bayezid I. Its guns c
16. 1989 Hillsborough disaster 97 Liverpool fans die in a crush at an FA Cup semi-final; long fight for justice follows.
17. 1450 Formigny: France takes back Normandy The French army — professional now, and bringing field artillery to battle — destroys England's last field force in Normandy; within four months the duchy Henry V conquered is enti
18. 1986 United States bombing of Libya Operation El Dorado Canyon: US airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi retaliate for Libyan-linked terrorism against Americans.
19. 1951 Pauling's structure of the alpha helix Linus Pauling and colleagues propose the alpha helix as a fundamental structure of proteins.
20. 1862 Dickinson writes to Higginson 'Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?' — the reclusive Amherst poet sends four poems to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her mentor for the rest of her li