Two events in history took place on this date.
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
The first being the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865.
Lincoln was watching a play, Our American Cousin, with his wife Mary and two guests in the presidential box. Actor John Wilkes Booth, a southern sympathizer, crept into the box and shot the president in back of the head with a one-shot derringer pistol shortly after 10:00 PM.
Booth leapt onto the theater stage, and broke his leg when a spur caught on some bunting, but still made his escape.
Lincoln was carried across the street to the Peterson rooming house where he died the next morning, becoming the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth was shot in a burning barn several days later and died.
I visited Ford's Theater and the Peterson rooming house in 1982. On the bed that Lincoln died, lies a pillow with still visible-bloodstains from that night. Ford's Theater has a museum in the basement and included are the clothes Lincoln wore the night he was shot.
On June 9, 1893, a structural failure of the top floor of Ford's Theater caused a collapse of the interior of the building, killing 22 and injuring several others. The building was converted into an office building previously and my great-grandfather was working at the building at the time of the collapse. He managed to escape injury.
The Sinking of The R.M.S. Titanic
The next big event of April 14 was the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic in the north Atlantic Ocean.
The Titanic, on its maiden voyage, struck an iceberg at 11:40 PM on April 14, 1912, (99 years ago) and sank to the bottom of the sea at about 2:20 a.m. the next morning, taking with it the lives of more than 1,500 people.
The inquest into the sinking found that the ship had an inadequate number of lifeboats, which added to the death toll.
A few years ago, I attended an exhibit on the Titanic disaster was in Los Angeles, which included a large section of the ship's hull that was raised from the bottom of the ocean.
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