this day in history

On 2 May 1611, Robert Barker printed the King James Bible - commissioned by James I to replace the subversive Geneva Bible with a clean, crown-endorsed text. He got what he asked for. The Puritans took it to New England.

On 1st May 1886, up to half a million American workers went on strike demanding an eight-hour day. Three days later, a bomb exploded at a rally in Chicago, and the United States gave the world International Workers' Day — then declined to observe it.

On 30 April 1803, the United States purchased 828,000 square miles from Napoleon for $15 million — about three cents an acre. Jefferson's envoys had gone to Paris to buy a city. They came back with a continent.

On 29th April 1483, the last Guanche resistance on Gran Canaria surrendered to the Kingdom of Castile. The conquest of the island was not just another colonial acquisition — it was the template. Every method applied to the Americas nine years later had already been tested here.

On 28 April 1945, Benito Mussolini was shot at a roadside near Lake Como and hung upside down from a petrol station in Milan. The man who invented fascism ended as a public spectacle in a piazza he had helped make notorious.

On 27th April 711, a Berber commander called Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at the rock that now bears his name. What followed was the destruction of the Visigothic Kingdom within months — and the beginning of 781 years of Muslim rule in Iberia.

On 26 April 1564, William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon. His birth date is unknown. For some people, this uncertainty is enough to convince them that a glover's son could not possibly have written Hamlet.

On 25 April 404 BC, Athens surrendered to Sparta, ending the Peloponnesian War. Twenty-seven years of plague, naval catastrophe, and Persian gold had turned Greece's golden age into rubble — and left a warning nobody has quite managed to heed.

On 24 April 1479 BC, Thutmose III became Pharaoh of Egypt. For the next 22 years, his stepmother Hatshepsut ran the kingdom. When he finally ruled alone, he built the largest empire in Egyptian history — then spent years trying to erase her from it.

On 23 April 1521, royalist forces crushed the Comuneros on a muddy field at Villalar. The revolt had almost ended the Spanish reign of Charles V before it properly began - a teenage Habsburg who spoke no Castilian, travelled with a Flemish court, and treated Spain as a bank to finance his Imperial ambitions elsewhere.