What Happened Today

John Wilkes Booth killed President Abraham Lincoln because he was an ardent Confederate sympathizer and he believed he would help revitalize the flailing Southern cause. Although Booth, the most handsome stage actor in America, was successful in fatally shooting the President, on every other level his plan was a dismal failure. The Confederate capitol of Richmond had fallen, the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered, and every other Confederate Army was on the ropes, but Booth's actions did nothing to help them. Additionally, he had a much larger conspiracy involving the assassination of Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State WIlliam H. Seward. Seward's would be assassin Lewis Powell attacked Seward, but did not kill him, and Johnson's attacker, George Atzerodt, got drunk and backed out. Yet John Wilkes Booth was able to sneak into the President's box at Ford's Theater, shoot Lincoln in the back of the head, and run away.. Eventually, he would be captured and killed, while his conspirators would be convicted and executed just months later.

Fort Sumter was a possession of the military of the United States of America in Charleston Harbor, which made it an odd location after South Carolina seceded from the Union. Built to guard Charleston Harbor from a naval attack, the not quite finished fort was easy to attack from Charleston itself, which made its position under Major Robert Anderson rather precarious. Once Abraham Lincoln became President, efforts to hold onto the fort and resupplying it were ramped up. Yet neither side wanted to be the aggressor, and finally, after ill-fated supply missions, the Confederacy requested the surrender of Fort Sumter. After Anderson refused, his former West Point assistant, Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, opened fire on behalf of the CSA. After half a day of shelling, Anderson decided it was prudent to surrender. This very first battle of the Civil War saw no casualties, but it inaugurated actual warfare in the Civil War, sparking recruitment and enthusiasm for the war effort. Despite its small scale, Fort Sumter would clearly draw the lines in the American Civil War.

Brixton was the home of the largest Afro-Caribbean community in Britain in 1981, a community which had only existed in Britain for a little over thirty years. Beginning with the MV Empire Windrush's voyage from Kingston to London in 1948, more and more people from the Caribbean moved to Britain, and in 1981 the community was particularly suffering from the country's economic recession. To add to the economic problems, crime was a consistent problem in Brixton. Combating that, the Metropolitan Police unveiled Operation Swamp 81, which relied on increasing the police presence in the area and stopping more individuals under the "sus law." After a stabbing and general confusion on the night of April 10, 1981, the people of Brixton came out in large numbers the next day. The riot would be dispersed by 1 AM the next morning, and although there were a number of injuries and considerable property damage, no one died in the riot. Yet the riot caused enough worry to warrant a special commission, which issued the Scarman Report, whose suggestions were never taken up.

The Good Friday Agreement was the basic peace treaty that ended "The Troubles," the large scale violence in Northern Ireland that stretched across decades. One of the problems with the Troubles is that the sides, broadly speaking Protestant Unionists and Catholic Republicans, were self-reinforcing. Violence would lead to retaliatory violence, and the defining feature of life in Northern Ireland became where someone fell on the Protestant/Catholic divide. Yet constant violence became wearing, and the various political parties began working towards peace negotiations in the 1990s. This made hardliners on both side separate, even as the main parties were working towards de-escalation and de-militarization. Finally, with the assistance of former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, the key parties sat down and worked out an agreement, featuring not only an official agreement to end the violence, but also creates new inter-governmental institutions between the British and Irish governments to help Northern Ireland achieve peace and some measure of self-governance.

The Battle of Appomattox Courthouse was not, all things considered, one of the great battles in history, but it was one of the most significant, as after a morning skirmish, Confederate General Robert E. Lee realized he had to surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Lee and his men had been on the run for about a week, after giving up Richmond to Grant's troops on April 2. Lee was trying to move around the Union forces in Virginia and meet up with his fellow Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina. Instead, Union troops shadowed the Confederate movements and forced them to engage at the small crossroads of Appomattox Courthouse. After one small push by the vanguard of the Confederate Army, Lee told Grant he would surrender. Grant offered a rather generous surrender, giving out rations to Lee's troops and agreeing that no one, from Lee to the lowest private, would be prosecuted for treason, although that is what every Confederate was engaged in. Lee was the first major Confederate commander to surrender his troops, but once Lee had done so, most others followed suit.

The monumental event that occurred when Hank Aaron hit a home run on April 8, 1974, was that he became the all time home run leader in baseball history, surpassing Babe Ruth. That was a big enough occasion, as Babe Ruth was the best player of all time and the record was seen as unbreakable for decades. Yet there was a larger context to Aaron's record-breaking home run. As a black man, Aaron received death threats for being on the verge of approaching Babe Ruth's total of 714. Really, Aaron was one of the first African-Americans who could have possibly broken Ruth's record, as baseball was only integrated in 1947, and Aaron joined the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. Therefore, Aaron had a long, outstanding career entirely in Major League Baseball, something that would not have been open to him had he been born a decade earlier. As the 1974 season opened, Aaron sat at 713 home runs, and everyone knew he would break the record. Finally, against the Los Angeles Dodgers' Al Downing in the Braves' home opener that season, Aaron hit the ball over the left field fence for the record.

Presidential press conferences usually do not have long lasting impacts on world events, but when Dwight Eisenhower addressed the issues at play in the Indochina War in a press conference in 1954, he articulated a specific theory about the spread of Communism that would influence American foreign policy for decades. Specifically, Eisenhower was asked why Americans should care about stopping Communism taking a foothold in Indochina, what is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Eisenhower responded with a multi-part answer that had an allusion to the "falling domino principle." In other words, Eisenhower was saying that if one nation fell to Communism, then their neighbors would become Communist in a succession of regime changes. Eisenhower refused to commit to helping Indochina directly, but the logic he laid out in what would become known as the domino theory was a driving principle in American involvement in Vietnam and the eruption of the Vietnam War.

In 1320, a large assortment of Scottish nobles and magnates, under the authority of King Robert I, sent a letter to Pope John XXII asserting the independence and sovereignty of Scotland. Therefore, the Declaration of Arbroath has often been seen as an early assertion of nationalism, but it also was simply a political necessity and convenience for the nation of Scotland. From 1290, Scotland was engaged in a series of wars with England and her King Edward I, which also developed into civil wars among various Scottish leaders. Eventually, by 1306, Robert the Bruce would prevail, and become King Robert I. Then he faced off with the new English King, Edward II, and won a series of battles, notably at Bannockburn and Berwick. Yet Edward II still refused to give up his claims to sovereignty in Scotland. So the Scots took to Pope John XXII, laying out in a careful letter Scotland's antiquity as a kingdom and separateness from England. Whether the Pope read it or did anything about it was unclear, but it did manage to assert Scotland's national identity.

Jess Willard won the World Heavyweight Championship in Havana on April 5, 1915, but his win was much more than the usual title victory, largely because of who he beat. Jack Johnson had become the first black World Heavyweight Championship in 1908 and subsequently became one of the most infamous, notorious, and controversial figures in American culture. The fact of a black champion made many people look for a "Great White Hope" that could beat him for the championship. He was brash and flashy, spending huge sums on clothing and cars, but more problematically for white America was the fact that Johnson consistently dated white women. After his first wife committed suicide, he was targeted for violating the Mann Act, which prohibited transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes, while pursuing his second wife. That charge didn't stick, but a different, related charge did. So from 1912, Johnson was a fugitive, traveling around the world. He would lose his belt to the giant Kansan Jess Willard in 1915, going down in the 26th round in Havana, Cuba.