Month In History

Discover the global events and personal stories of April

April 1, 1953

Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day

Ben-Gurion painfully acknowledges that if the Jewish state had been founded in 1937, millions of Jews would not have died in the Holocaust.

April 4, 1835

The Mortal Presidency

He is head of state, Commander-in-chief, and the country’s top legislator. The President of the United States has arguably the toughest job in America, and it turns out, the most deadly.

April 4, 1841

John Tyler Becomes the First Vice President to Assume the Presidency

Tyler, the first vice president to inherit the presidency, jokes about his being “an accident”

April 4, 1889

The First Presidential Typed Letter

Benjamin Harrison: the earliest known example of a typewritten presidential letter.

Theodore Roosevelt, circa 1911. Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-36665.
April 6, 1917

The United States Enters First World War

Theodore Roosevelt was dying to serve in World War I. He was, he reminded all who could hear, an ex-Commander in Chief of the United States Army, and ready to once again lead “his” First United States Volunteer Cavalry – the “Rough Riders” – into the fray. But President Wilson, whom Roosevelt detested, refused the appointment

Portrait of President Harry S. Truman. Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. Accession Number: 58-766-09.
April 12, 1945

Read Across America Day: It Was His Boyhood Reading, Truman Recalls, That Prepared Him for When His “Terrible Trial Came”

No one has ever taken history, or algebra, or Latin, and not at some point asked, querulously, “when am I ever going to need to use this?”  The answer, according to Harry S. Truman, is when you are struck by lightning one day and wake up to find yourself president of the United States.

April 14, 1865

The Jewish Doctor at Lincoln’s Deathbed

A recently acquired letter offers new revelations.

©Shapell Manuscript Foundation. All Rights Reserved. For more information, please contact us at www.shapell.org.
April 15, 1912

The Sinking of the RMS Titanic

President William Howard Taft, heartbroken at the loss on the Titanic of his military aide, writes an emotional eulogy.

April 18, 1846

Abraham Lincoln Poem “My Childhood Home I See Again”

An exceptionally rare Lincoln autobiographical letter – mentioning the death of his mother and sister, and his elegiac poem “My Childhood Home I See Again, And Sadden With the View.”



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