April 12 · This Day in America
At 4:30 in the morning, a single mortar shell arcs over Charleston Harbor and bursts above a brick fort in the dark. Then fifty guns answer. Inside Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson and eighty-some men — low on food, out of options, the last federal flag in a state that has declared itself gone — hold for thirty-four hours under more than four thousand rounds. The fort burns. Anderson surrenders. By a strange mercy, the bombardment kills no one; the only deaths come after, when a gun explodes during the farewell salute to the flag. But the thing that has been argued in parlors and Congress for forty years is now decided by cannon. The Civil War has begun. Before it ends, it will take more American lives than every other war combined, and it will finally force the country to answer the question it was founded avoiding.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1981
Twenty years to the day after the first human reached space, John Young and Robert Crippen ride the first reusable spaceship off the pad at Cape Canaveral. No one has ever flown a spacecraft like this — a winged ship meant to launch like a rocket and land like a plane, and to do it again and again. Two days later Columbia glides down onto a California desert lakebed, wheels down, intact. The space age has a vehicle that comes home.
Source: www.nasa.gov