Jennifer's 20th Century History Blog April 2005 Archive

President Ronald Reagan's complete personal handwritten diaries of his eight years in the White House will be published in 2006 by HarperCollins. According to the publisher the diaries ... Read More

Thirty years ago on Saturday, two North Vietnamese tanks crashed though the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon at 10:45 am on April 30, 1975, marking the end of ... Read More

Read this interesting essay about life in Belarus nine years after the Chernobyl disaster in neighboring Ukraine.

This year, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) begins Wednesday evening and lasts through Thursday, May 5. Learn more and remember the Holocaust here on my site.

Salem, Massachusetts, the home of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, is considering erecting a statue of the fictional witch Samantha Stephens from the 1960s television show Bewitched in Salem's central ... Read More

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has apologized in the wake of a new Japanese school textbook that China claims is too soft on Japanese aggression in World War II. ... Read More

The American Historical Association along with historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., David McCullough and Gordon Wood, among others, have signed a petition arguing that the "No Child Left Behind" law ... Read More

Despite the violent riots that plagued his city during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, historians say that Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was very much opposed to the Vietnam War. ... Read More

In development since 1997 and the first of its kind, the Atomic Testing Museum opened its doors in late February in Las Vegas, Nevada. The new museum, located just ... Read More

Cornell University's Law Library has placed a complete 277-page study of Adolf Hitler's personality online. The 1943 study was compiled by psychologist Henry Murray while he worked at the ... Read More

The cream-filled yellow cakes known as Twinkies turn 75 years old this year. The Twinkie was invented in 1930 by James Dewar who was manager of Chicago's Continental Bakery. ... Read More

On April 12, fifty years will have passed since the development of the polio vaccine. The development of the vaccine is a fascinating story, for prior to the vaccine's development ... Read More

Jack Johnson, a black boxer who became heavyweight champion in 1908, was convicted of breaking a federal law that banned the interstate transport of women for immoral purposes because he ... Read More

Jane Fonda has announced that she regrets her decision to visit a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun site in 1972, which earned her the nickname "Hanoi Jane." She told 60 Minutes ... Read More

At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, a shot rang out. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel ... Read More

In 1928, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming made a chance discovery. From a contaminated experiment, he found a powerful antibiotic, penicillin.