It is the beginning of what poet T. S. Eliot called "the cruelest month," and it is April Fool's Day. The birthday club includes Sergei Rachmaninoff and Milan Kundera - with a reading from Lord Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage."

Spain's "Edict of Expulsion," the U.S. Motion Picture Production Code goes into effect, the U.S. launches the Civilian Conservation Corps, and happy birthday to Johann Sebastian Bach - with a reading from "Aurora Leigh," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Evan Gershkovich should be free. More info, here:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68679483

The U.S. buys Alaska, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is signed, and the birthday club includes Anna Sewell, Carl Lutz, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Shahla Sherkat, Marie-Christine Koundja, and Tobias Hill - with a reading from the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 19.

Canada gets its birthday, residents of Washington, D.C. get the vote, and (the rest of) the birthday club includes Sheila Kitzinger, Eric Idle, Alec Wilkinson, Jo-Ann Mapson, and Evelyn C. White - with a reading from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."

Happy birthdays to Maxim Gorky, Nelson Algren, Iris Chang, and Jennifer Weiner - with a reading from Algren's "The Neon Wilderness."

U.S. President Andrew Johnson vetoes the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the birthday club includes Jane Colden Charles Mackay, Jelena Demitrijevic, and Louis Simpson - with a reading of Mackay's "No Enemies."

The first printing of Aesop's Fables in English, signing the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, and the birthday club includes Julie-Victoire Daubie, Robert Frost, Joseph Campbell, Viktor Frankl, and Tennessee Williams - with a reading of Frost's "Lodged."

Sir Walter Raleigh gets a royal patent to settle North America, Percy Bysshe Shelley gets booted from Oxford for publishing "The Necessity of Atheism," and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks to the marchers who reached Montgomery, and happy birthdays to Flannery O'Connor and Gloria Steinem - with a reading from O'Connor's "Wise Blood."

The UK passes the Quartering Act, the cause of tuberculosis is discovered, and the birthday club includes Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Erica Kennedy - with a reading from "A Princess of Mars," by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Patrick Henry gives his "Give me liberty or give me death!" speech, Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero implores his nation's military to stop murdering civilians, and the birthday club includes Akira Kurosawa and Subhadra Joshi - with a reading from Henry's speech.