According to tradition, on April 21, 753 B.C., Romulus and his twin brother, Remus, found Rome on the site where they were suckled by a she-wolf as orphaned infants. Actually, the Romulus and Remus myth originated sometime in the fourth century B.C., and the exact date of Rome’s founding was set by the Roman scholar […]

During the Texan War for Independence, the Texas militia under Sam Houston launches a surprise attack against the forces of Mexican General Santa Anna along the San Jacinto River. The Mexicans were thoroughly defeated, and hundreds were taken prisoner, including General Santa Anna himself. After gaining independence from Spain in the 1820s, Mexico welcomed foreign […]

On April 21, 1895, Woodville Latham and his sons, Otway and Gray, demonstrate their “Panopticon,” the first movie projector developed in the United States. Although motion pictures had been shown in the United States for several years using Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, the films could only be viewed one at a time in a peep-show box, […]

In the well-trafficked skies above the Somme River in France, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the notorious German flying ace known as the Red Baron,” is killed by Allied fire on April 21, 1918. Richthofen, the son of a Prussian nobleman, switched from the German army to the Imperial Air Service in 1915. By 1916, he […]

On the afternoon of April 21, 1966, a bar crawl in New York’s West Village leads to an important early moment in the gay liberation movement. In what will be dubbed the “Sip-In,” Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell and John Timmons publicly identify themselves as gay and demand to be served anyway, challenging the unofficial but […]

On April 21, 1973, Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” tops the U.S. pop charts. The yellow ribbon has long been a symbol of support for absent or missing loved ones, but this song turned the tradition into a cultural phenomenon. There are some who believe that the […]

Rosie Ruiz, age 26, finishes first in the women’s division of the Boston Marathon with a time of 2:31:56 on April 21, 1980. She was rewarded with a medal, a laurel wreath and a silver bowl; however, eight days later Ruiz is stripped of her victory after race officials learned she jumped into the race […]