April 24
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Featured Event
©Carolina K. Smith, M.D./Shutterstock.com
On this day in 1990, Gruinard Island was declared safe after a 48-year quarantine. This remote island off the western coast of Scotland was, in the 1940s, a deserted place. The British government decided it would be the perfect setting to test a plan to attack Nazi Germany with anthrax-laced cattle feed. Scattered across the German countryside, the feed would be eaten by livestock, the British reasoned, and then enter the food supply, causing mass casualties. So they did the same to Gruinard: they let dozens of sheep loose, exposed them to the anthrax bacterium, saw the sheep die, and decided the plan would work. It was never implemented, however, and Gruinard was left contaminated until, after years of protests, the government removed the island’s top layers of soil, eradicating the lingering anthrax spores and making Gruinard safe for birds, rabbits, and tourists. [Read today’s edition of Today in History > >]
Featured Biography
Featured Biography
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
Barbra Streisand—one of the most popular singers of her generation, a star of stage and screen (especially in musicals), and one of the most powerful women in show business—was born in Brooklyn this day in 1942.
Famous Birthdays
More on April 24
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images News
2011
The website WikiLeaks, in collaboration with several media organizations, began releasing classified U.S. documents detailing the treatment of prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp from 2002 to 2008. [Why are documents classified?]
© Gasper Furman/Shutterstock.com
2005
Pope Benedict XVI, the successor to John Paul II, formally assumed his position as the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church during a mass in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. [How is the pope elected?]
Evening Standard—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
2004
Estée Lauder, who cofounded the global fragrance and beauty company that bears her name, died in Manhattan. [Why did people start wearing makeup?]
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
2003
Officials of North Korea informed U.S. diplomats that it had nuclear weapons and was making bomb-grade plutonium. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about Korea.]
MPI—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
1980
U.S. forces launched a mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, but the attempt failed, and eight U.S. service members were killed. [Explore a timeline of U.S.-Iran relations since 1953.]
NASA
1967
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first man known to have died during a space mission when his spacecraft’s parachute failed as he returned to Earth. [Test your knowledge of famous astronauts and cosmonauts.]
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1949
Communist forces occupied the Chinese capital, Nanking (Nanjing), after crossing the Yangtze River virtually unopposed by adherents to the Nationalist government under President Chiang Kai-shek. The fall of Nanking marked the beginning of the disintegration of the Nationalist government, and the Chinese Civil War would end a few months later with the Communists in control of virtually all of mainland China. [Take our China quiz.]
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
1916
Members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized strategic points in Dublin, marking the beginning of the Easter Rising and the start of the republican revolution in Ireland, which would culminate in the Irish War of Independence. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about European history.]
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
1905
Novelist, poet, and critic Robert Penn Warren—who became the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986 (though he was preceded by many consultants in poetry)—was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. [Test your knowledge of all things literary.]
© Luiz Alberto—Archive Photos/Getty Images
1904
Artist Willem de Kooning, one of the leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism, was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. [From symbolism to sculpture, test your knowledge of art.]
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
1898
After months of increasing tension between the United States and Spain over rebels fighting for independence in Spanish-controlled Cuba, Spain responded to American threats of intervention by declaring war on the United States. The ensuing war lasted for about three months. [What role did American newspapers play in the outbreak of the Spanish-American War?]
Image: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1877
Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire during efforts to conclude the Serbo-Turkish War. What proved to be the last Russo-Turkish War resulted in Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro being made independent from Turkish rule, among other changes in the Balkans. [Read more about how Europe reacted to Russia’s growing power in the Balkans.]
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; photography by Carol M. Highsmith (digital file no. LC-DIG-highsm-03196)
1800
The Library of Congress was officially founded as U.S. President John Adams approved the $5,000 appropriated to acquire “such books as may be necessary for the use of congress.” It eventually became the largest library in the world. [Take our quiz about ancient libraries and archives.]
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
1792
Army officer Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. [How much do you know about French history?]