This is a list of selected April 14 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.
Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article, featured list or picture of the day.
To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.
Images
Use only ONE image at a time
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Apollo 13 mission patch
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Bust of Septimius Severus
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Edward IV of England
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Gnassingbé Eyadéma
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Hailstones from the 1999 Sydney hailstorm
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Two-inch quadruplex videotape
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Niceto Alcalá-Zamora
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Noah Webster
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John Wilkes Booth
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Illustration of celestial phenomena in Nuremberg
Ineligible
Blurb | Reason |
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193 – Septimius Severus seized the throne of the Roman Empire after the death of Pertinax during the Year of the Five Emperors. | date not verifiable - many sources say 9 April |
1434 – The foundation stone of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes, Brittany, France, was first laid, but the building was not completed until more than four centuries later in 1891. | refimprove |
1828 – Lexicographer Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his dictionary of American English. | refimprove section |
1865 – Actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth fatally shot U.S. President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. | POTD for 2020 |
1927 – The first Volvo automobile was built in the factory in Hisingen, Gothenburg, Sweden. | date not cited, refimprove section |
1931 – After King Alfonso XIII left Spain, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed by a provisional government led by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora. | unreferenced section, refimprove section |
1939 – The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and a major factor in his 1962 Nobel Prize award, was first published. | refimprove sections |
1945 – The 4th Canadian (Armoured) Division deliberately destroyed the German town of Friesoythe on the orders of Major General Christopher Vokes. | TFA for 2020 |
1956 – The use of 2-inch quadruplex, the first practical and commercially successful videotape format, was first demonstrated in public. | unreferenced section |
2003 – The completion of the Human Genome Project was announced. | refimprove section |
2007 – In Ankara, Turkey, the first of the Republic Protests took place, when hundreds of thousands of people protested against the possible presidential candidacy of incumbent prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. | list should be converted to prose |
2010 – Plumes of ash from a major eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland led to widespread disruption of air travel throughout Europe for several days. | need to verify date -- earliest date with citation is 15 Apr |
Eligible
- 1471 – Wars of the Roses: The Yorkists under Edward IV defeated the Lancastrians near the town of Barnet, killing Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.
- 1561 – In Nuremberg, there was a mass sighting of celestial phenomena where observers described an "aerial battle" between odd-shaped objects.
- 1906 – The Azusa Street Revival, the primary catalyst for the spread of Pentecostalism in the 20th century, opened in Los Angeles.
- 1908 – The first Hauser Dam in the U.S. state of Montana failed and caused severe flooding and damage downstream.
- 1944 – The freighter SS Fort Stikine, carrying a mixed cargo of cotton bales, gold and ammunition, exploded in the harbour in Bombay, India, sinking surrounding ships and killing about 800 people.
- 1967 – After leading a military coup three months earlier, Gnassingbé Eyadéma installed himself as President of Togo, a post which he held until 2005.
- 1970 – An oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13 exploded (damage pictured), causing the NASA spacecraft to lose most of its oxygen and electrical power.
- 1978 – Thousands of Georgians demonstrated in Tbilisi against an attempt by the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian SSR to change the constitutional status of the Georgian language.
- 1994 – In a friendly fire incident during Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq, two U.S. Air Force aircraft mistakenly shot down two U.S. Army helicopters, killing 26 people.
- 1999 – A storm dropped an estimated 500,000 tonnes of hailstones in Sydney and along the east coast of New South Wales, causing about A$2.3 billion in damages, the costliest natural disaster in Australian insurance history.
- 2014 – Boko Haram kidnapped 276 female students from the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria.
- Born/died this day: Lucia Visconti (d. 1424 | John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu (d. 1471) | Christiaan Huygens (b. 1629) | William Whitehead (d. 1785) | Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom (b. 1857) | V. Gordon Childe (b. 1892) | John Gielgud (b. 1904) | L. L. Zamenhof (d. 1917) | Rod Steiger (b. 1925) | Yakov Dzhugashvili (d. 1943) | Berry Berenson (b. 1948) | Rachel Carson (d. 1964) | Lita (b. 1975) | Sarah Michelle Gellar (b. 1977)
Notes
- RMS Titanic listed on April 15
- A Dictionary of the English Language appears on April 15 so Noah Webster should not appear in the same year.
- Battle of Barnet and John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu, should not be featured in the same year
April 14: Bengali New Year, Tamil New Year, and other New Year festivals in South and Southeast Asia (2020); Day of the Georgian Language (1978); N'Ko Alphabet Day in West Africa (1949)
- 43 BC – Mark Antony's forces initially had the upper hand in the Battle of Forum Gallorum, but were forced to retreat by a counter-attack by Roman Republican legions.
- 966 – Mieszko I, ruler of the Polans, converted to Christianity, an event considered to be the founding of the Polish state.
- 1935 – Dust Bowl: A severe dust storm swept across Oklahoma and northern Texas, removing an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil from the prairies.
- 1909 – Following a reactionary military revolt against the Committee of Union and Progress, a mob began a massacre of Armenian Christians in the Adana Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire.
- 2010 – Nearly 2,700 people were killed in an earthquake registering 6.9 Mw in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, China.
- Harriett Ellen Grannis Arey (b. 1819)
- Arthur Matthew Weld Downing (b. 1850)
- M. Visvesvaraya (d. 1962)