🌟 Editor's Note
Good morning — it’s Sunday, April 12. We're taking a look at the Fourth Crusade, Galileo's trial, the early US settlers on the Pacific coast, kicking off the Civil War, Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel, the first jet engine, Rock Around The Clock, the first human in space, and much more — all quick, sharp, and super clear.
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🚀 Time Machine
-1204
The Fourth Crusade occupies and plunders Constantinople.
-1633
Chief Inquisitor Father Vincenzo Maculani, appointed by Pope Urban VIII, starts the inquisition of Galileo Galilei for heresy.
-1811
First US colonists on the Pacific coast land at Cape Disappointment, Washington.
-1861
Fort Sumter in South Carolina was attacked by the Confederacy, starting the American Civil War.
-1927
Chiang Kai-shek starts a counter-revolution by violently suppressing Communist groups.
-1932
"Grand Hotel" premieres in New York, starring Greta Garbo and John Barrymore (Best Picture 1932)
-1937
The first jet engine designed to power an aircraft was ground-tested by Frank Whittle in Rugby, England.
-1954
Bill Haley and His Comets record “(We're Gonna) Rock Around The Clock.”
-1960
Astronomer Frank Drake launches Project Ozma, the first modern SETI experiment to detect radio signals from deep space.
-1961
Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth in space aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft.
-1963
On Good Friday, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for protests against segregation.
-1981
The space shuttle Columbia is launched from Cape Canaveral, becoming the first reusable manned spacecraft.
-2023
Ghana has approved a new malaria vaccine, Mosquirix (RTS, S), the first major vaccine approved in Africa.
📸 Snapshot
King George V's 10-day hunting expedition in Nepal killed numerous tigers, rhinoceros, bears, leopards, deer, boar, porcupines, and birds in 1911
🗨️ Last Words
“It is all the same in the end.”