1865

John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was surrounded near Port Royal, Virginia, and killed.

1913

Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old worker at a Georgia pencil factory, was strangled; Leo Frank, the factory superintendent, was convicted . (Frank’s death sentence was commuted, but he was lynched by an antisemitic mob in 1915.)

1986

In the worst nuclear disaster in history, an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine caused radioactive fallout to begin spew ing into the atmosphere. Dozens of people were killed in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, while the long-term death toll from radiation poisoning is believed to number in the thousands.