Today is Thursday, April 23, the 114th day of 2020. There are 252 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On April 23, 1616 (Old Style calendar), English poet and dramatist William Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on what has traditionally been regarded as the 52nd anniversary of his birth in 1564.
On this date:
In 1898, Spain declared war on the United States, which responded in kind two days later.
In 1914, Chicago’s Wrigley Field, then called Weeghman Park, hosted its first major league game as the Chicago Federals defeated the Kansas City Packers 9-1.
In 1943, U.S. Navy Lt. (jg) John F. Kennedy assumed command of PT-109, a motor torpedo boat, in the Solomon Islands during World War II. (On Aug. 2, 1943, PT-109 was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, killing two crew members; Kennedy and 10 others survived.)
In 1954, Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves hit the first of his 755 major-league home runs in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. (The Braves won, 7-5.)
In 1968, student protesters began occupying buildings on the campus of Columbia University in New York; police put down the protests a week later. The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church merged to form the United Methodist Church.
In 1969, Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death for assassinating New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. (The sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment.)
In 1987, 28 construction workers were killed when an apartment complex being built in Bridgeport, Connecticut, suddenly collapsed.
In 1988, a federal ban on smoking during domestic airline flights of two hours or less went into effect.
In 1996, a civil court jury in The Bronx, New York, ordered Bernhard Goetz (bur-NAHRD’ gehts) to pay $43 million to Darrell Cabey, one of four young men he’d shot on a subway car in 1984.
In 1998, James Earl Ray, who confessed to assassinating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and then insisted he’d been framed, died at a Nashville, Tennessee, hospital at age 70.
In 2005, the recently created video-sharing website YouTube uploaded its first clip, “Me at the Zoo,” which showed YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.
In 2007, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first freely elected president, died in Moscow at age 76.