- 114th Day of 2013 / 251 Remaining
- 58 Days Until The First Day of Summer
- Sunrise:6:20
- Sunset:7:54
- 13 Hours 34 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:7:03pm
- Moon Set:5:28am
- Moon’s Phase:98 %
- The Next Full Moon
- April 25 @ 12:59pm
- Full Pink Moon
- Full Sprouting Grass Moon
- Full Egg Moon
- Full Fish Moon
This moon’s name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
- Tides
- High:10:53am/10:36pm
- Low:4:29am/4:22pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:16.32
- Last Year:15.30
- Normal To Date:22.73
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Pigs-in-a-Blanket Day
- Library of Congress Day
- Mother, Father Deaf Day
- National Pet Parent's Day
- National Concord Day-Niger
- Genocide Memorial Day-Armenia
- On This Day In …
- 1792 --- The French national anthem, "La Marseillaise," was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
1800 --- President John Adams approves legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress," thus establishing the Library of Congress. The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the library's first home. The first library catalog, dated April 1802, listed 964 volumes and nine maps. Twelve years later, the British army invaded the city of Washington and burned the Capitol, including the then 3,000-volume Library of Congress. Former president Thomas Jefferson, who advocated the expansion of the library during his two terms in office, responded to the loss by selling his personal library, the largest and finest in the country, to Congress to "recommence" the library. The purchase of Jefferson's 6,487 volumes was approved in the next year, and a professional librarian, George Watterston, was hired to replace the House clerks in the administration of the library. In 1851, a second major fire at the library destroyed about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including two-thirds of the Thomas Jefferson library. Congress responded quickly and generously to the disaster, and within a few years a majority of the lost books were replaced. After the Civil War, the collection was greatly expanded, and by the 20th century the Library of Congress had become the de facto national library of the United States and one of the largest in the world. Today, the collection, housed in three enormous buildings in Washington, contains more than 17 million books, as well as millions of maps, manuscripts, photographs, films, audio and video recordings, prints, and drawings.
- 1897 --- William Price became the first to be named White House news reporter.
- 1898 --- Spain declared war on the United States after rejecting America's ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.
- 1901 --- Four games were scheduled to open the brand new American League baseball season. Three of them, however, were rained out. The Chicago White Stockings beat the Cleveland Blues 8-2 before a paid crowd of over 10,000 fans in the only game played. The new league, nicknamed the junior circuit, was made up of teams in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Minneapolis. Buffalo, Indianapolis and, initially, Minneapolis, fell out of the league, with new teams in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and, later, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, Ft. Worth and Toronto joining the American League.
- 1915 --- The Ottoman Empire rounded up Armenian political and cultural leaders in Constantinople at the start of what many scholars regard as the first genocide of the 20th century, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died.
- 1916 --- On Easter Monday in Dublin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization of Irish nationalists led by Patrick Pearse, launches the so-called Easter Rebellion, an armed uprising against British rule. Assisted by militant Irish socialists under James Connolly, Pearse and his fellow Republicans rioted and attacked British provincial government headquarters across Dublin and seized the Irish capital's General Post Office. Following these successes, they proclaimed the independence of Ireland, which had been under the repressive thumb of the United Kingdom for centuries, and by the next morning were in control of much of the city. Later that day, however, British authorities launched a counteroffensive, and by April 29 the uprising had been crushed. Nevertheless, the Easter Rebellion is considered a significant marker on the road to establishing an independent Irish republic.
- 1934 --- Laurens Hammond announced news that would be favored by many churches across the United States. The news was the development of the pipeless organ -- and a granting of a U.S. patent for same. Hammond, a decades-old name in keyboard organs in churches, theaters, auditoriums and homes, is the same Hammond who fostered many of the developments that would make electronic keyboards so popular in modern music. The Hammond B-3 and B-5 organs, for example, became mainstays for many recording artists, while inventions in Hammond organ loud speaker development (the Hammond Leslie Tremelo speaker) produced still other important milestones that allowed small organs to emulate the big concert theater console organs.
- 1945 --- President Harry Truman learns the full details of the Manhattan Project, in which scientists are attempting to create the first atomic bomb, on this day in 1945. The information thrust upon Truman a momentous decision: whether or not to use the world's first weapon of mass destruction. America's secret development of the atomic bomb began in 1939 with then-President Franklin Roosevelt's support. The project was so secret that FDR did not even inform his fourth-term vice president, Truman, that it existed. (In fact, when Truman's 1943 senatorial investigations into war-production expenditures led him to ask questions about a suspicious plant in Minneapolis, which was secretly connected with the Manhattan Project, Truman received a stern phone call from FDR's secretary of war, Harry Stimson, warning him not to inquire further.) When President Roosevelt died on April 14, 1945, Truman was immediately sworn in and, soon after, was informed by Stimson of a new and terrible weapon being developed by physicists in New Mexico. In his diary that night, Truman noted that he had been informed that the U.S. was perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.
- 1954 --- Billboard magazine, the music industry trade publication, headlined a change to come about in the music biz. The headline read, “Teenagers Demand Music with a Beat -- Spur Rhythm and Blues” ... a sign of times to come. Within a year, R&B music by both black and white artists caught the public’s fancy.
- 1955 --- The Afro-Asian Conference--popularly known as the Bandung Conference because it was held in Bandung, Indonesia--comes to a close on this day. During the conference, representatives from 29 "non-aligned" nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East met to condemn colonialism, decry racism, and express their reservations about the growing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
- 1961 --- U.S. President Kennedy accepted "sole responsibility" following Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
- 1961 --- Bob Dylan earned a $50 session fee for playing harmonica on Harry Belafonte's "Midnight Special." It was his recording debut.
- 1980 --- An ill-fated military operation to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Tehran ends with eight U.S. servicemen dead and no hostages rescued. With the Iran Hostage Crisis stretching into its sixth month and all diplomatic appeals to the Iranian government ending in failure, President Jimmy Carter ordered the military mission as a last ditch attempt to save the hostages. During the operation, three of eight helicopters failed, crippling the crucial airborne plans. The mission was then canceled at the staging area in Iran, but during the withdrawal one of the retreating helicopters collided with one of six C-130 transport planes, killing eight soldiers and injuring five. The next day, a somber Jimmy Carter gave a press conference in which he took full responsibility for the tragedy. The hostages were not released for another 270 days.
- 1990 --- The road crew for Roger Waters discovered an unexploded World War II era bomb while constructing the set for "The Wall" concert in Potsdamer Platz, Germany.
- 1997 --- The U.S. Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. The global treaty banned the development, production, storage and use of chemical weapons.
- Birthdays
- Sue Grafton
- Barbra Streisand
- Robert Bailey Thomas
- Justin Wilson
- Robert Penn Warren
- Shirley MacLaine
- Doug Clifford
- Cedrick the Entertainer
- Omar Vizquel
- Willem de Kooning
- Eric Bogosian
- Kelly Clarkson