What happened on 25 April?

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

1. 1953 Watson and Crick discover DNA structure Watson and Crick's double-helix paper is published in Nature, alongside papers by Wilkins and by Franklin and Gosling whose X-ray data underpinned it.
2. 1599 Born: Oliver Cromwell Parliamentary general; Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland 1653-1658.
3. 1920 British Mandate for Palestine League of Nations mandate for Britain to administer Palestine.
4. 1915 Anzac landings at Gallipoli Australian and New Zealand troops land at Anzac Cove — origin of the Anzac legend.
5. 1644 Fall of Beijing (1644) Rebel leader Li Zicheng captures Beijing; Chongzhen Emperor commits suicide; Manchu forces enter through Shanhai Pass and establish Qing rule in Beijing.
6. 1792 Rouget de Lisle composes La Marseillaise In one night in Strasbourg, an army engineer writes a war song for the Rhine army; volunteers from Marseille sing it marching into Paris that summer, and it takes their name. Revol
7. 1644 Ming dynasty ends Conventional end of Ming dynasty.
8. 1974 Carnation Revolution A near-bloodless military coup in Lisbon overthrows the Estado Novo dictatorship, ushering in Portuguese democracy and decolonisation.
9. 1917 Born: Ella Fitzgerald Jazz First Lady of Song.
10. 1945 East meets West at the Elbe An American patrol meets Soviet soldiers on a wrecked bridge at Torgau on the Elbe, cutting Germany in two; the photographs of handshakes flash around the world. For one day the al
11. 1719 Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Castaway novel that influenced the form of the English novel.
12. 1926 Puccini's Turandot Puccini dies during treatment for throat cancer with the finale unfinished; at La Scala's premiere Toscanini lays down his baton where the composer stopped. 'Nessun dorma' later be
13. 1945 Truman is told about the bomb Thirteen days after becoming president on Roosevelt's death, Truman is briefed by Stimson and Groves on a weapon he knew nothing of as vice-president — 'the most terrible weapon ev
14. 1185 Battle of Dan-no-ura Final naval battle of the Genpei War; child Emperor Antoku drowns; Minamoto Yoritomo becomes effective ruler.
15. 1913 Cat and Mouse Act Allows release of hunger-striking suffragettes when ill, with re-arrest on recovery; designed to avoid martyr deaths.
16. 2015 Nepal earthquake A magnitude-7.8 quake kills nearly 9,000 in Nepal and topples historic monuments in Kathmandu.
17. 1938 Homage to Catalonia Orwell's memoir of fighting with the POUM militia, being shot through the throat and fleeing the communist purge of his comrades — it sells barely 600 copies in his lifetime.
18. 1961 Kurosawa's Yojimbo Toshiro Mifune's wandering samurai plays two gangs against each other — remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars.
19. 1792 The guillotine claims its first victim Highwayman Nicolas Pelletier is executed in Paris by Dr Guillotin's 'humane' beheading machine — adopted so that death would be equal, instant and classless. Within two years it is
20. 1626 Battle of Dessau Bridge In his first great test, Wallenstein's new army holds the Elbe crossing at Dessau and shatters Ernst von Mansfeld's Protestant force.
21. 1809 Treaty of Amritsar (1809) Ranjit Singh and the East India Company fix the Sutlej river as the limit of his power, leaving the Maharaja free to build his empire north and west of it.