April 7

397 During the late Roman Empire, there were concerns about the influence of "barbarian" culture on Roman society, and there were attempts to limit the adoption of barbarian dress and custom. The wearing of barbarian clothing in the City of Rome was banned by the Emperor Honorius on April 7, 397 AD. 

1141 After Empress Matilda, the daughter of King Henry I of England's forces captured King Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141, she became the first female ruler of England on April 7, 1141. However, the Empress's attempt to be crowned at Westminster Abbey collapsed in the face of bitter opposition from the London crowds. As a result of this retreat, Matilda was never formally declared Queen of England, and was instead titled "Lady of the English."

Portrait of Empress Mathilda, from "History of England" (15th century)

1498 Vasco Da Gama and his crew were the first known Europeans to visit the Kenya port of Mombasa. They landed there on April 7, 1498, but were met with hostility and soon departed. Vasco da Gama later stopped off in Malindi, where he was given a warm reception from Shiek of Malindi, and hired a guide for the voyage to India.

1506 The Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier was born on April 7, 1506 in the royal castle of Xavier, near Sangüesa and Pamplona, in the Spanish kingdom of Navarre. In 1541 Xavier was commissioned by King John III of Portugal to preach the Christian faith in the Portuguese colonies in the East, thus marking the beginning of the Jesuit missions. He was influential in evangelization work, most notably in India and Japan.

The castle of the Xavier family By Jsanchezes,

1724 Johann Sebastian Bach debuted the St. John Passion, BWV 245, on April 7, 1724, in Leipzig, Germany. This sacred oratorio, based on the Gospel of John, was composed by Bach for the Good Friday Vespers service at the St. Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig. The St. John Passion is one of Bach's most renowned choral compositions and holds a significant place in the repertoire of Baroque sacred music.

1770 The poet William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770 in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in NW England. A volatile child, on one occasion on suffering an indignity, William went up to the attic intending to kill himself with a fencing sword. In 1778, William's father sent him as a boarder to Hawkshead Grammar School in Cumbria. It as there that William fell in love with countryside and nature and began to write poetry.

1788 On April 7, 1788 American pioneers arrived at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, They established there the town of Marietta (in modern Ohio), the first permanent American settlement outside the original Thirteen Colonies. In doing so they opened the westward expansion of the new country.

Picketed Point stockade at Marietta

1798 After Great Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War, the Mississippi River became the border between the British and Spanish Empires with Great Britain given rights to all land east of the Mississippi and Spain rights to land west of the Mississippi. Following the American Revolution, Britain ceded the Mississippi area to the United States of America. On April 7, 1798 the Mississippi Territory was organized from disputed territory claimed by both the United States and Spain.

1805 Beethoven's 3rd Symphony was originally called Bonaparte in tribute to Napoleon. When Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor in 1804, the disillusioned Beethoven tore up the pages of his score in a rage, and changed it to Eroica (heroic). The first public performance was on April 7, 1805 in Vienna's Theater-an-der-Wien. Innovative in length and size of orchestra, reactions were decidedly mixed to Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. Many critics criticized the first movement for its dissonant chords.

Beethoven's title page shows his erasure of dedication of the work to Napoleon

1827 The Stockton-On-Tees, England, based chemist John Walker began selling the world’s first friction matches on April 7, 1827. The price of a box of 50 matches was one shilling. With each box was supplied a piece of sandpaper, folded double, through which the match had to be drawn to ignite it. Between 1827 and 1829, Walker made about 168 sales of his matches. They were however dangerous and flaming balls sometimes fell to the floor burning carpets and dresses,.

1837 The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Anderson's delightful account of the mermaid who wanted to be a whole human, was first published on April 7, 1837. Critics hated Hans Christian Andersen's early fairy tales, so he delayed publishing The Little Mermaid for a year. Anderson wrote 168 fairy tales all of them written with simplicity and wisdom. Many of their moral meanings were intended for adults. The great Dane himself did not rate his fairy tales very highly.

The Little Mermaid is found by the Prince illustration by Edmund Dulac

1841 President William Henry Harrison was the first President to die in office. His funeral took place in Wesley Chapel in Cincinnati, Ohio on April 7, 1841. His original interment was in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. He was later buried in North Bend, Ohio. His grandson was the 23rd President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison.

1848 The national flag of Slovenia features three equal horizontal bands of white, blue, and red, with the Slovenian coat of arms centred in the white and blue bands. The existing Slovene tricolor was raised for the first time in history during the Revolution of 1848 by the Slovene Romantic nationalist activist and poet Lovro Toman on April 7, 1848, in Ljubljana, in response to a German flag which was raised on top of Ljubljana Castle.

1853 The first baby to be delivered by chloroform was Wilhelmina Carstairs. It became an established means of anesthesia after Queen Victoria allowed herself to be chloroformed by Dr John Snow to diminish the pains during the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold on April 7. 1853.

1859 Yale University football player and coach Walter Camp was born on April 7, 1859. Known as the "Father of American Football," among the sport's most distinctive features he introduced, include the eleven-man team, a type of scrimmage in which a player snapped the ball back by kicking it to the quarterback and the system of downs.

1889 At a dinner party on April 7, 1889, at the home of Robert Browning's friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann, an Edison cylinder phonograph recording was made of Browning reciting part of How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix (and forgetting the words). When the recording was played in 1890 on the first anniversary of Browning's death, at a gathering of his admirers, it was said to be the first time anyone's voice "had been heard from beyond the grave."

1891 P.T. Barnum, co-founder of The Barnum & Bailey Circus, died at his Bridgeport, Connecticut, home on April 7, 1891, several months after suffering a stroke in 1890 during a performance. In 1871 Barnum established the ‘Greatest Show on Earth’, which included the midget ‘Tom Thumb’, a circus, a menagerie, and an exhibition of ‘freaks’, conveyed in 100 railway carriages. He also brought Jumbo the Elephant and the Siamese twins Chang and Eng to an American public eager for spectacle.

1896 On April 7, 1896, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, along with Hjalmar Johansen, reached a record Farthest North latitude of 86°13.6'N during an Arctic expedition on board the Fram. This was almost three degrees further north than the previous record, which had been set by another Norwegian explorer, Nansen's mentor, Otto Sverdrup.

1915 Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915, At the time of her birth, her mother, Sadie Fagan  was just 13. It is thought her father was Clarence Holiday, who abandoned Sadie when Billie was an infant to pursue a career as a jazz guitarist. She started singing in the early 1930s in Harlem, New York City, for tips in night clubs. Holiday took her professional pseudonym from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and her probable musician father.

1927 On April 7, 1927, the first long-distance public television broadcast in America was made from Washington, D.C., to New York City. The broadcast displayed the image of then-Commerce Secretary, Herbert Hoover, who gave a speech at the dedication of the new transmitter. 

1928 Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian physician who experimented with blood transfusion to gain eternal youth. He died on April 7, 1928 after injecting himself with blood from a student infected with malaria and tuberculosis, who also may have been the wrong blood type.

1933 In March of 1933, President F.D. Roosevelt signed the Cullen–Harrison Act which went into effect on April 7, 1933. Thus, at midnight on that fateful day, the sale of beer with an alcohol content of 3.2% (by weight) and wine of similarly low alcohol content, became legal once again after thirteen years of prohibition. Upon signing the legislation, Roosevelt made his famous remark, "I think this would be a good time for a beer."

1939 In an effort to mimic Hitler’s conquest of Prague, Mussolini’s troops invaded and occupied Albania on April 7, 1939. King Zog was ejected from his throne by the Italians and escaped to England. He never saw his country again.

1940 The Scottish terrier Fala was born on April 7, 1940. The dog of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during their time in the White House, he was one of the most famous presidential pets. Fala's antics were widely covered in the media. He was so well known to Americans during his presidency that American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge would ask each other what the president's dog was named in order to prove that they weren't Germans in disguise.

1944 A Slovakian Jew, Rudolf Vrba and a fellow prisoner, Alfred Wetzler succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944. Their report was one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of the mass killings in the camp.

1947 Henry Ford died on April 7, 1947 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age 83 at his Dearborn estate.
All Ford plants and dealers were closed on the day of his funeral three days later.  Ford left a personal estate of around $600,000,000 at his death. Most of it was left to the Ford Foundation, a non profit organisation, set up by Ford and his son "for scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare." It subsequently became the richest private foundation in the world.

1948 World Health Day is held each year on April 7th to celebrate the founding of the World Health Organisation on that date in 1948. The day is an opportunity to raise awareness about important public health issues and to mobilize action around the world to improve health outcomes. WHO's headquarters are in Geneva (see below).

By Yann Forget - Wikipedia Commons

1956 The 1912 Treaty of Fez made Morocco a protectorate of France, while Spain assumed the role of protecting power over the northern and southern Saharan zones. In November 1955 the French government accepted the principle of independence for Morocco. This came into effect in March 1956, followed by Spain ceding most of its protectorate in Northern Morocco to the new state on April 7, 1956.

1964 The actor Russell Crowe was born in Wellington, New Zealand on April 7, 1964. When Crowe was four years old, his family moved to Sydney, Australia. Both Russell Crowe's parents were movie set caterers; his father also managed a hotel. His maternal grandfather was a cinematographer who was named an MBE for filming footage of World War II. Crowe attended Auckland Grammar School with his cousins New Zealand cricketers Martin Crowe and Jeff Crowe.

1970 John Wayne, one of Hollywood's most iconic leading men, won the Academy Award for Best Actor on April 7, 1970, for his role as Rooster Cogburn in the western film True Grit. The win was well-deserved, as Wayne's portrayal of the cantankerous, one-eyed marshal was widely praised by critics and audiences alike. Despite his long and illustrious career in the film industry, this was his first and only Oscar win.

1977 Donald Trump married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelníčková, on April 7, 1977, at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.  They had three children: sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric
By early 1990, Trump's troubled marriage to Ivana and affair with actress Marla Maples had been reported in the tabloid press. They were divorced in 1992.

1994 The Rwandan Genocide begun on April 7, 1994 when the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down. Hutu extremists killed an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutus over the following 100 days.
The Tutsi Republican Public Front gradually took control of Rwanda methodically, gaining control of the whole country by July 1994 and ending the genocide.

2009 Alberto Fujimori, the president of Peru from 1990 until 2000, ended his presidency by fleeing to Japan amid a major scandal involving corruption and human rights violations. He was extradited to face criminal charges in Peru and on April 7, 2009, Fujimori was convicted of human rights violations and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The verdict marked the first time that an elected head of state has been extradited to his home country, tried, and convicted of human rights violations.

Fujimori in September 2008. By Iamtheboo