On April 15, 1783 ? Preliminary articles of peace ending the American Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence) are ratified.
On April 15, 1783 – Preliminary articles of peace ending the American Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence) are ratified.
1791 – Surveyor General Andrew Ellicott consecrated the southern tip of the triangular District of Columbia at Jones Point.
1850 – The city of San Francisco was incorporated.
1861 – Three days after the attack on Fort Sumter, S.C., President Lincoln declared a state of insurrection and called for 75,000 Volunteers to quell the insurrection that soon became the American Civil War.
1865 – President Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, dies from an assassin’s bullet. Shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington the night before, Lincoln lived for nine hours before succumbing to the severe head wound he sustained.
1889 – A marshal’s posse captured and killed a group of Sooners, settlers who stole onto the Public Domain territory in Oklahoma in hopes of claiming it legally, just nine days before the official start of the land rush.
1919 – Jane Arminda Delano (b.1862), founder of the American Red Cross Nursing Service, died in France while on a Red Cross mission and was buried there.
1951 – Lieutenant General James A. Van Fleet took command of Eighth Army. Van Fleet, a 1915 West Point graduate with the class “the stars fell on,” commanded a machine gun battalion in World War I, led the 8th Infantry Regiment ashore at Normandy and by the end of World War II was a major general commanding a corps. In the late 1940s he was head of a joint U.S. military advisory group in Greece where he advised Greek forces in successfully stopping a communist-supported insurgency.
1952 – President Harry Truman signed the official Japanese peace treaty.
1952 – The 1st B-52 prototype test flight was made. The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress is a longrange, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bomber.
1962 – The first Marine air unit is sent to Vietnam.
1971 – North Vietnamese troops ambushed a company of Delta Raiders from the 101st Airborne Division near Fire Support Base Bastogne in Vietnam. The American troops were on a rescue mission.
2002 – Operation Mountain Lion began and was designed to find enemy fighters in the Gardez and Khost regions, destroy those that were there and deny them control of the area and an opportunity to reorganize their forces.