Something to think about.Something to discover.Something to remember.Every day.
⌕ My Time Capsule

Explore 15 April

Explore 15 April: British troops reach Bergen-Belsen, Africa’s independent states meet in Accra, the death of Hu Yaobang sets Beijing’s students in motion and a group of Paris painters stage the first Impressionist show. Meet Leonardo da Vinci, Leonhard Euler and Bessie Smith, born on this date, and remember Jean-Paul Sartre.

This day through time →12 verified events across 5 eras

⌛12Full
Timeline ◈4Historic
Moments ♙8Born
Today ✦5Lives
Remembered ◉1Firsts &
Discoveries ☆1Sporting
Moments ♫1Culture
Stories ☉1Observances
Camp No. 1 at Bergen-Belsen, largely evacuated, seen from a guard tower after the liberation in April 1945 (Imperial War Museums).
Camp No. 1 at Bergen-Belsen, largely evacuated, seen from a guard tower after the liberation in April 1945 (Imperial War Museums).
Image creditNo 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Oakes, H (Sgt) · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1945

British troops reach Bergen-Belsen

On 15 April 1945 soldiers of the British 11th Armoured Division and the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, under a local truce agreed with the retreating German forces. Inside they found some 60,000 starving and gravely ill prisoners and thousands of unburied dead, with typhus spreading through the huts.

The army organised emergency food and medical care, but many of the survivors were too weak to recover. Film and photographs taken by British cameramen and reporters brought the reality of the Nazi camps to audiences at home, and the evacuated camp was burned to halt the disease.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Imperial War Museums: The liberation of Bergen-Belsen ↗
The Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Accra, where Ghana's first leader is buried.
The Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Accra, where Ghana’s first leader is buried.
Image creditSimon Ontoyin · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
1958

Africa’s independent states meet in Accra

On 15 April 1958 Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of a Ghana barely a year free of British rule, opened the first Conference of Independent African States in Accra. Delegates came from the only eight independent countries on the continent at that time: Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia.

Over a week of talks they pledged support for peoples still under colonial rule and called for an annual Africa Freedom Day, first kept on 15 April. The meeting is seen as the first step towards the Organisation of African Unity, whose founding on 25 May 1963 later became Africa Day.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: allAfrica: 50th anniversary of the First Conference of Independent African States, 15 April 1958 ↗
Hu Yaobang as a young Communist Party official in north Sichuan, around 1950.
Hu Yaobang as a young Communist Party official in north Sichuan, around 1950.
Image creditunknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1989

Hu Yaobang’s death sets Beijing’s students in motion

Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded former head of China’s Communist Party who had been forced out in 1987, died in Beijing on 15 April 1989, a week after suffering a heart attack. Students and intellectuals saw him as a champion of openness, and within hours tributes began appearing at universities and in Tiananmen Square.

Mourning soon grew into demands for press freedom and an end to official corruption, and by his funeral on 22 April tens of thousands had gathered outside the Great Hall of the People. The protests spread to cities across China and lasted seven weeks, until the army cleared the square on the night of 3 to 4 June.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Hu Yaobang ↗
Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, the painting that gave the Impressionists their name.
Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, the painting that gave the Impressionists their name.
Image creditClaude Monet · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1874

The Impressionists stage their own show

On the evening of 15 April 1874 a group of painters shut out of, or tired of, the official Paris Salon opened an exhibition of their own in the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the boulevard des Capucines. About thirty artists, among them Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley and Cézanne, showed some 165 works.

Only around 3,500 people came in a month, a tiny fraction of the Salon’s crowds, and many critics mocked the loose brushwork. One of them, Louis Leroy, borrowed the title of Monet’s harbour scene Impression, Sunrise to sneer at the ‘Impressionists’, and the name stuck.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Gallery of Art: 1874, the birth of Impressionism ↗
♙
PEOPLE

Born Today

Leonardo da Vinci
Image creditAttributed to Francesco Melzi · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1452

Leonardo da Vinci

Florentine painter of the Mona Lisa, engineer and tireless sketcher of machines, anatomy and nature.

Leonhard Euler
Image creditJakob Emanuel Handmann · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1707

Leonhard Euler

Swiss mathematician whose notation and discoveries shaped modern mathematics and physics.

Nikita Khrushchev
Image creditTASS · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1894

Nikita Khrushchev

Soviet leader who denounced Stalin and steered the USSR through the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Tomas Tranströmer
Image creditPia Nordlander / bildN · CC BY 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1931

Tomas Tranströmer

Swedish poet of spare, luminous images, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Claudia Cardinale
Image creditUnknown · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1938

Claudia Cardinale

Tunis-born Italian film star of The Leopard and Once Upon a Time in the West.

Emma Thompson
Image creditKalai Ramu · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1959

Emma Thompson

British actor and screenwriter, the only person to win Oscars for both acting and writing.

Emma Watson
Image creditGeorges Biard · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1990

Emma Watson

English actor who grew up on screen as Hermione Granger and campaigns for gender equality.

◉
IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

Eyjafjallajökull erupting on 17 April 2010.
Eyjafjallajökull erupting on 17 April 2010.
Image creditÁrni Friðriksson · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
2010

A volcanic ash cloud empties Europe’s skies

On 15 April 2010 a plume of fine ash from Eyjafjallajökull, erupting beneath an Icelandic ice cap, drifted south-east across the North Atlantic and airports in Britain, Ireland, Norway and beyond began shutting down. Glass-like volcanic ash can melt inside jet engines and make them fail, so regulators closed airspace over much of northern and western Europe.

In about a week some 100,000 flights were cancelled and roughly 10 million passenger journeys disrupted, the greatest closure of European skies since the Second World War. The crisis pushed scientists, engine makers and regulators to agree safe ash-concentration limits so that planes could fly around future eruptions.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NASA Earth Observatory: Ash plume across the North Atlantic ↗
☆
SPORTING HISTORY

Sporting Moments

Jackie Robinson in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform (National Portrait Gallery, Washington).
Jackie Robinson in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform (National Portrait Gallery, Washington).
Image creditHarry Warnecke, Frank Livia, Robert F. Cranston and William Klein · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
1947

Jackie Robinson walks out at Ebbets Field

On 15 April 1947 Jackie Robinson took his place at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the Boston Braves, in front of 26,623 spectators. He became the first Black player in the modern major leagues, ending an unwritten colour line that had kept African Americans out for more than sixty years.

He went hitless that day but scored a run in a Dodgers win, and by the autumn had been named the first Rookie of the Year despite abuse from rival players and crowds. Every major-league player now wears his number 42 on 15 April each year.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Baseball Hall of Fame: April 15, 1947, a first draft of history ↗
♫
MUSIC • FILM • BOOKS • CULTURE

Culture Stories

Fire in the roof of Notre-Dame, seen from Square René-Viviani at 7.51 pm on 15 April 2019.
Fire in the roof of Notre-Dame, seen from Square René-Viviani at 7.51 pm on 15 April 2019.
Image creditLeLaisserPasserA38 · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
2019

Fire tears through the roof of Notre-Dame

Early on the evening of 15 April 2019 fire broke out in the timber roof space of Notre-Dame de Paris, the Gothic cathedral on the Île de la Cité. Crowds along the Seine watched as the nineteenth-century spire toppled and most of the medieval oak roof burned away.

Firefighters saved the two west towers, and the stone vaults largely held, protecting the great rose windows and many treasures below. After more than five years of restoration using oak and traditional craft skills, the cathedral reopened on 7 December 2024.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Notre-Dame de Paris ↗
✦
LIVES REMEMBERED

Remembered Today

Matthew Arnold
Image creditElliott & Fry · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1888

Matthew Arnold

English poet of ‘Dover Beach’ and influential critic of Victorian culture and education.

Father Damien
Image creditWilliam Brigham · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1889

Father Damien

Belgian priest who spent his last years caring for people with leprosy on Molokai, Hawaii.

Joey Ramone
Image creditYves Lorson · CC BY 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
Died 2001

Joey Ramone

Singer of the Ramones, whose fast, stripped-down songs helped launch punk rock.

☉
AROUND THE WORLD

Observances & Anniversaries

Leonardo da Vinci in red chalk, attributed to his pupil Francesco Melzi; World Art Day falls on his birthday.
Leonardo da Vinci in red chalk, attributed to his pupil Francesco Melzi; World Art Day falls on his birthday.
Image creditAttributed to Francesco Melzi · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
UN day

World Art Day

UNESCO proclaimed 15 April as World Art Day at its General Conference in 2019, building on a celebration begun by the International Association of Art in 2012. The date marks the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci, chosen as a symbol of creativity, free expression and the links between art and other fields.

Museums, schools and artists use the day to celebrate artistic diversity and the part creative work plays in education and society.

Source: UNESCO: World Art Day ↗
HISTORY & TIMELINE

Finished the highlights?

Follow 15 April chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the modern day, with 12 verified events and the sources behind them.

This day through time →
Sources & further reading