William Shakespeare born

Brian Boru, the high king of Ireland, is assassinated by a group of retreating Norsemen shortly after his Irish forces defeated them. Brian, a clan prince, seized the throne of the southern Irish state of Dal Cais from its Eoghanacht rulers in 963. He subjugated all of Munster, extended his power over all of southern Ireland, and […]

Future President James Buchanan is born in Cove Gap near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, on April 23, 1791. Buchanan, remembered mostly for his administration’s corruption and his failure to solve the country’s crisis over slavery, also inspired salacious gossip about his love life over the course of his career. The son of wealthy Scottish and Irish immigrant […]

On April 23, 1915, Rupert Brooke, a young scholar and poet serving as an officer in the British Royal Navy, dies of blood poisoning on a hospital ship anchored off the Greek island of Skyros, while awaiting deployment in the Allied invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Brooke, born in 1887 in Rugby, Britain, attended King’s […]

On April 23, 1954, Hank Aaron knocks out the first home run of his Major League Baseball career. Twenty years later, Aaron becomes baseball’s new home run king when he broke Babe Ruth’s long-standing record of 714 career homers. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Aaron began his professional baseball career in 1952 in the Negro […]

On April 23, 1969, Sirhan Sirhan is sentenced to the death penalty after being convicted in the assassination of politician Robert F. Kennedy. In 1972, Sirhan’s sentence was commuted to life in prison after California abolished the death penalty. In the early morning hours of June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy, a U.S. senator from New […]

On April 23, 1985, The Coca-Cola Company announces that it is changing the formula of its signature soft drink for the first time in 99 years. The short-lived, sweeter New Coke, as it is called, debuts to a consumer backlash that pundits call the marketing blunder of the century. Coca-Cola, which had been the world’s […]