Today is Tuesday, April 14, the 104th day of 2026. There are 261 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot and mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth during a performance of the play “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington; Lincoln was taken to a boarding house across the street and died the following morning at 7:22 a.m.
Also on this date:
In 1828, the first edition of Noah Webster’s “American Dictionary of the English Language” was published.
In 1912, the British liner RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. ship’s time and began sinking. (The ship went under two and a half hours later, killing over 1,500 people.)
In 1910, William Howard Taft became the first U.S. president to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game as the Washington Senators beat the Philadelphia Athletics 3-0.
In 1935, the devastating “Black Sunday” dust storm descended upon the central Plains as hundreds of thousands of tons of airborne topsoil turned a sunny afternoon into total darkness.
In 1981, the first test flight of America’s first operational space shuttle, the Columbia, ended successfully with a landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
In 2021, a white former suburban Minneapolis police officer, Kim Potter, was charged with second-degree manslaughter for killing 20-year-old Black motorist Daunte Wright in a shooting that ignited days of unrest. (Potter would be found guilty and serve 16 months in prison.)
In 2022, the missile cruiser Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, sank while being towed to port after being hit by two Ukrainian missiles and gutted by fire, U.S. officials confirmed.
Today’s Birthdays: Former NYPD detective Frank Serpico is 90. Actor Julie Christie is 86. Rock musician Ritchie Blackmore is 81. Actor Peter Capaldi is 68. Actor Brad Garrett is 66. Actor Robert Carlyle is 65. Golf Hall of Famer Meg Mallon is 63. Baseball Hall of Famer Greg Maddux is 60. Actor Anthony Michael Hall is 58. Actor Adrien Brody is 53. Rapper Da Brat is 52. Actor Sarah Michelle Gellar is 49. Actor-producer Rob McElhenney is 49. Actor Abigail Breslin is 30. Soccer player Dean Huijsen is 21.