

April 26, 2004

On April 26, 1607, Capt. John Smith landed at Cape Henry, Va., with the colonists who would establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere.

In 1785 ornithologist and artist John James Audubon was born in Les Cayes, Haiti.

In 1865 Federal troops surrounded John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, on a farm near Bowling Green, Va. (He was found fatally shot in a barn, possibly from suicide.)

In 1893 novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes") was born in what now is Mt. Shasta, Calif.

In 1894 Rudolf Hess, later Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party, was born in Alexandria, Egypt.

In 1941 the Cubs installed the first organ at a major league baseball park, Wrigley Field.

In 1945 Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France's Vichy regime during World War II, was arrested.

In 1964 the African republics of Tanganyika and Zanzibar united to form Tanzania.

In 1986 the world's worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire killed at least 31 and sent radioactivity into the atmosphere.

In 1989 actress Lucille Ball, 77, died in Los Angeles.

In 2000 Vermont Gov. Howard Dean signed into law the nation's first measure allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions.

In 2002 an expelled student went on a shooting rampage at a school in Erfurt, Germany, killing 17 people, including himself. It was Germany's worst school shooting ever.