Events on April 20 47
Year 1453
Three Genoese galleys and a Byzantine blockade runner fight their way through an Ottoman blockading fleet a few weeks before the fall of Constantinople.
Year 1534
Jacques Cartier begins his first voyage to what is today the east coast of Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Year 1535
The sun dog phenomenon observed over Stockholm and depicted in the famous painting Vädersolstavlan.
Year 1657
Admiral Robert Blake destroys a Spanish silver fleet under heavy fire at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Year 1657
Freedom of religion is granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam (later New York City).
Year 1752
Start of Konbaung-Hanthawaddy War, a new phase in the Burmese Civil War (1740-57).
Year 1770
The Georgian king, Erekle II, abandoned by his Russian ally Count Totleben, wins a victory over Ottoman forces at Aspindza.
Year 1775
American Revolutionary War: The Siege of Boston begins, following the battles at Lexington and Concord.
Year 1789
George Washington arrives at Grays Ferry, Philadelphia while en route to Manhattan for his inauguration.
Year 1792
France declares war against the "King of Hungary and Bohemia", the beginning of French Revolutionary Wars.
Year 1809
Two Austrian army corps in Bavaria are defeated by a First French Empire army led by Napoleon at the Battle of Abensberg on the second day of a four-day campaign that ended in a French victory.
Year 1818
The case of Ashford v Thornton ends, with Abraham Thornton allowed to go free rather than face a retrial for murder, after his demand for trial by battle is upheld.
Year 1828
René Caillié becomes the second non-Muslim to enter, and the first to return from, Timbuktu, following Major Gordon Laing.
Year 1861
American Civil War: Robert E. Lee resigns his commission in the United States Army in order to command the forces of the state of Virginia.
Year 1862
Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard complete the experiment falsifying the theory of spontaneous generation.
Year 1865
Astronomer Angelo Secchi demonstrates the Secchi disk, which measures water clarity, aboard Pope Pius IX's yacht, the L'Immaculata Concezion.
Year 1876
The April Uprising begins. Its suppression shocks European opinion, and Bulgarian independence becomes a condition for ending the Russo-Turkish War.
Year 1898
President William McKinley signed a joint resolution to Congress for declaration of War against Spain, beginning the Spanish-American War.
Year 1914
Nineteen men, women, and children die in the Ludlow Massacre during a Colorado coal-miner's strike.
Year 1916
The Chicago Cubs play their first game at Weeghman Park (currently Wrigley Field), defeating the Cincinnati Reds 7-6 in 11 innings.
Year 1918
Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a. The Red Baron, shoots down his 79th and 80th victims, his final victories before his death the following day.
Year 1922
The Soviet government creates South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast within Georgian SSR.
Year 1945
World War II: US troops capture Leipzig, Germany, only to later cede the city to the Soviet Union.
Year 1945
World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
Year 1945
Twenty Jewish children used in medical experiments at Neuengamme are killed in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school.
Year 1946
The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the United Nations.
Year 1999
Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and injured 24 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
Year 2007
Johnson Space Center shooting: William Phillips with a handgun barricades himself in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas before killing a male hostage and himself.
Year 2008
Danica Patrick wins the Indy Japan 300 becoming the first female driver in history to win an Indy car race.
Year 2010
The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning an oil spill that would last six months.
Year 2012
One hundred twenty-seven people are killed when a plane crashes in a residential area near the Benazir Bhutto International Airport near Islamabad, Pakistan.
Year 2013
A 6.6-magnitude earthquake strikes Lushan County, Ya'an, in China's Sichuan province, killing more than 150 people and injuring thousands.
Year 2015
Ten people are killed in a bomb attack on a convoy carrying food supplies to a United Nations compound in Garowe in the Somali region of Puntland.