Today’s highlight

On April 23, 2005, the recently created video-sharing website YouTube uploaded its first clip, “Me at the Zoo,” which showed YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.

On this date

1616: William Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on what has traditionally been regarded as the 52nd anniversary of his birth in 1564.

1898: Spain declared war on the United States, which responded in kind two days later.

1954: Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves hit the first of his 755 major-league home runs in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. (The Braves won, 7-5.)

1969: Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death for assassinating New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. (The sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment.)

1988: A federal ban on smoking during domestic airline flights of two hours or less went into effect.

2007: Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first freely elected president, died in Moscow at age 76.

2013: France legalized same-sex marriage after a wrenching national debate that exposed deep conservatism in the nation’s heartland and triggered huge demonstrations. Mullah Omar, the reclusive leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, died in a Pakistani hospital. (News of Omar’s death would not reach the United States for more than two years.)