Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
* On April 25, 1719, Daniel Defoe’s fictional work “The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” is published. The book, about a shipwrecked sailor who spends 28 years on a deserted island, is based on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years on a small island off the coast of South America in the early 1700s.
* On April 29, 1854, the Ashmun Institute, the first college founded solely for black students, is officially chartered in southeastern Pennsylvania. Renamed Lincoln University after the Civil War, its graduates include poet Langston Hughes and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
* On April 27, 1865, an explosion on a Mississippi River steamboat kills an estimated 1,547 people, mostly Union soldiers returning home after the Civil War. The Sultana was built to hold 376 passengers, but reports say that there were as many as 2,700 people on board.
* On May 1, 1931, New York City’s Empire State Building is dedicated. The idea for the Empire State Building is said to have been born of a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corp. and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors to see who could erect the taller building.
* On April 30, 1948, the Land Rover, a British-made all-terrain vehicle, debuts at an auto show in Amsterdam. The Land Rover had a boxy, utilitarian design, four-wheel drive and a canvas roof. Seat cushions, doors, a heater and spare tire were considered extras.
* On April 28, 1965, Barbra Streisand’s debut television special, “My Name is Barbra,” is aired. One sequence was shot on location in the fur department of Bergdorf Goodman, where Streisand vamped in exotic fur coats to a medley of poverty songs, including “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.”
* On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear accident to date occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear plant near Kiev in Ukraine. An estimated 4,000 clean-up workers died from radiation poisoning, as many as 70,000 people suffered severe poisoning and a large area of land might not be livable for as many as 150 years.
(c) 2011 King Features Synd., Inc.
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