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This Day in History

This Day in History: April 24

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This Day in History: April 24 Video

This Day in History: April 24

Take a look at all of the important historical events that took place on April 24.

On this day, April 24 …

2003: China shuts down a Beijing hospital as the global death toll from SARS surpasses 260.

Also on this day:

  • 1800: Congress approves a bill establishing the Library of Congress.
  • 1877: Federal troops are ordered out of New Orleans, ending the North’s post-Civil War rule in the South.
  • 1915: In what’s considered the start of the Armenian genocide, the Ottoman Empire begins rounding up Armenian political and cultural leaders in Constantinople.
  • 1916: Some 1,600 Irish nationalists launch the Easter Rising by seizing several key sites in Dublin. (The rising would be put down by British forces five days later.)
  • 1967: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is killed when his Soyuz 1 spacecraft smashes into the Earth after his parachutes fail to deploy properly during re-entry; he was the first human spaceflight fatality.
  • 1970: The People’s Republic of China launches its first satellite, which keeps transmitting a song, “The East Is Red.”
The burned out wreckage of a U.S. aircraft lies in the desert some 300 miles south of Tehran after the abortive commando-style raid into Iran, April 1980, aimed at freeing the American hostages being held in Tehran. The rescue mission fell apart when several helicopters failed and a helicopter and C141 transport plane collided. At least 8 U.S. servicemen died in the mission. (AP Photo)

The burned out wreckage of a U.S. aircraft lies in the desert some 300 miles south of Tehran after the abortive commando-style raid into Iran, April 1980, aimed at freeing the American hostages being held in Tehran. The rescue mission fell apart when several helicopters failed and a helicopter and C141 transport plane collided. At least 8 U.S. servicemen died in the mission. (AP Photo)

  • 1980: The United States launches an unsuccessful attempt to free the American hostages in Iran, a mission that results in the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen.
  • 1990: The space shuttle Discovery blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope.
  • 1995: The final bomb linked to the Unabomber explodes inside the Sacramento, Calif., offices of a lobbying group for the wood products industry, killing chief lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray. (Theodore Kaczynski would be later sentenced to four lifetimes in prison for a series of bombings that killed three men and injured 29 others.) 
  • 2003: U.S. forces in Iraq take custody of Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister.
  • 2005: Pope Benedict XVI formally begins his stewardship of the Roman Catholic Church.
  • 2009: Mexico shuts down schools, museums, libraries and state-run theaters across its overcrowded capital in hopes of containing a deadly swine flu outbreak.
  • 2009: Back-to-back suicide bombers strike near a Shiite shrine in Baghdad, killing 71.
  • 2018: Former police officer Joseph DeAngelo is arrested at his home near Sacramento, Calif., after DNA links him to crimes attributed to the so-called “Golden State Killer"; authorities believe he committed 13 murders and more than 50 rapes in the 1970s and 1980s.