NOW YOU KNOW

• On April 4, 1968,  civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot to death at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.
• On April 7, 1949,   the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "South Pacfic" opened on Broadway.
• On April 8, 1911,  an explosion at the Banner Coal Mine in Littleton, Ala., claimed the lives of 128 men, most of them convicts loaned out from prisons.
• On April 11, 1970,  Apollo 13, with astronauts James A. Lovell, Fred W. Haise and Jack Swigert, blasted off on its ill-fated mission to the moon.
• On April 12, 1861,  the American Civil War began as Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.  (The Union troops holding the fort surrendered the following day.)
• On April 13, 1861,  Fort Sumter in South Carolina fell as the Union commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, agreed to surrender in the face of the Confederates' relentless bombardment.
• On April 14, 1865,  President Abraham Lincolon was shot and mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth during a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washinton.  The president died nine hours later.
• On April 15, 1865,  President Abraham Lincoln died, nine hours after being shot the night before by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater in Washington.  Andrew Johnson became the nation's 17th president.
• On April 18, 1775,  Paul Revere began his famous ride from Charlestown to Lexington, Mass.,warning American colonists that the British were coming.
• On April 19, 1995,  a truck bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. (Bomber Timothy McVeigh was later convicted of federal murder charges and executed.)
• On April 20, 1999, the Columbine High School massacre took place in Colorado as two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, shot and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives.
• On April 21, 1910,  author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, died in Redding, Conn., at age 74.
• On April 22, 1864,  Congress authorized the use of the phrase "In God We Trust" on U.S. coins.
• On April 25, 1507,  German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller produced a world map containing the first recorded use of the term "America," in honor of Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.
• On April 26, 1986,  a major nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) as an explosion and fire caused radioactive fallout to begin spewing into the atmosphere.  At least 31 people died fighting the plant fire.
• On April 27, 1865,  the steamer Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tenn., killing more than 1,400 people, mostly freed Union prisoners of war.
• On April 28, 1789,  the mutiny on HMS Bounty took place as the crew of the British ship set Capt. William Bligh and 18 sailors adrift in a launch in the South Pacific.  (Bligh and most of the men with him managed to reach Timor in 47 days.)
• On April 29, 1429,  Joan of Arc entered the besieged city of Orleans to lead a French victory over the English.