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Our on this day in history archives contain over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few more of them:

April 26 is the 116th day of the year (117th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 249 days remain until the end of the year.

EVENTS

1564 – Playwright William Shakespeare is baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (date of birth is unknown).

1607 – The Virginia Company colonists make landfall at Cape Henry.

1803 – Thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of L'Aigle, France; the event convinces European scientists that meteors exist.

1805 – First Barbary War: United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon.

1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, in Virginia.

1920 – Ice hockey makes its Olympic debut at the Antwerp Games with center Frank Fredrickson scoring seven goals in Canada's 12–1 drubbing of Sweden in the gold medal match.

1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established by Hermann Göring.

1937 – Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain, is bombed by German Luftwaffe.

1954 – The first clinical trials of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine begin in Fairfax County, Virginia.

1956 – SS Ideal X, the world's first successful container ship, leaves Port Newark, New Jersey, for Houston, Texas.

1958 – Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York City after 68 years, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.

1962 – NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.

1981 – Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center performs the world's first human open fetal surgery.

1986 – The Chernobyl disaster occurs in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

1991 – Fifty-five tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak's end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year's only F5 tornado.

1993 – The Space Shuttle Columbia is launched on mission STS-55 to conduct experiments aboard the Spacelab module.

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