April 14 · This Day in America
Five days after Appomattox, with the war finally won and the country dizzy with relief, Abraham Lincoln goes to the theater. It is Good Friday. During the third act of a comedy, John Wilkes Booth steps into the presidential box and fires a single bullet into the back of the president's head, then leaps to the stage shouting and vanishes into the night. Lincoln is carried across the street to a boarding house and laid diagonally across a bed too short for him. He never wakes. He dies the next morning at 7:22, and a man in the room says, "Now he belongs to the ages." The president who held the Union together and signed slavery's end does not live to see the peace he made. The country he saved has to learn how to grieve and rebuild at the same time.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1935
A clear spring afternoon on the southern Plains turns, in minutes, into a wall of blackness six hundred feet high, racing south at sixty miles an hour. Day becomes a darkness deeper than night. Three hundred thousand tons of topsoil — entire farms — lift into the sky and move. People who lived through it thought the world was ending. The next day a reporter, writing from the ruined heart of it, gave the catastrophe its lasting name: the Dust Bowl.
Source: www.weather.gov
“Now he belongs to the ages.”Edwin Stanton, attributed, 1865