April 10th Through History

Explanation: The Titanic departed from Southampton on April 10, 1912, with about 2,224 passengers and crew members on board. It struck an iceberg during the night of April 14-15, 1912 and sank in less than three hours, causing the death of approximately 1,500 people. It is one of the deadliest maritime disasters in peacetime history.

Explanation: The Good Friday Agreement, also called the Belfast Agreement, ended decades of conflict in Northern Ireland known as "The Troubles". Signed by the British government, the Irish government and most of the Northern Irish political parties, it led to the creation of a Northern Ireland Assembly and largely contributed to the end of the sectarian violence that had caused more than 3,500 deaths since 1969.

Explanation: The Statute of Anne, or Copyright Act of 1710, is considered the first modern copyright law in the world. It granted authors and publishers legal protection for 14 years, renewable once. This law served as a model for many intellectual property laws around the world.

Explanation: The first image of a black hole, that of the M87 galaxy located 55 million light-years away, was made public on April 10, 2019. It was obtained thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope project, which coordinated eight radio telescopes around the world to form a telescope the size of the Earth. The astrophysicist Katie Bouman played a key role in developing the algorithm that made it possible to reconstruct this image.

Explanation: The eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia (then colonized by the Netherlands), is considered the most powerful volcanic eruption in documented human history. It projected so much ash into the atmosphere that the year 1816 has remained in memory as the "year without a summer", causing famines in many regions of the world. Tambora directly killed approximately 10,000 people and the climatic consequences killed an additional 60,000 to 80,000.

Explanation: The Great Gatsby, by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, is often considered the quintessential American novel, illustrating both the American dream and its disillusionment in the Roaring Twenties. Despite modest sales upon its release, it has become an absolute classic of American literature and has been adapted several times for film, notably in 1974 with Robert Redford and in 2013 with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Explanation: The Tupolev 154 carrying Polish President Lech Kaczyński crashed in Smolensk, Russia, killing 96 people. The delegation was traveling to Katyn to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, during which the Soviet NKVD had executed about 22,000 Polish officers, police officers and intellectuals in 1940. This tragedy decapitated a large part of the Polish political and military elite.

Explanation: The first round of the French presidential election on April 10, 2022 qualified Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen for the second round. This duel was a repeat of the second round of 2017. Macron won the second round on April 24, 2022 with about 58.5% of the votes, becoming the first French president since Jacques Chirac in 2002 to be re-elected for a second term.

Explanation: The "ping-pong diplomacy" refers to the diplomatic rapprochement between the United States and China initiated through exchanges of table tennis players. The arrival of the American team in China on April 10, 1971 preceded the historic visit of President Nixon to China in February 1972, ending more than 20 years of diplomatic isolation between the two countries. This expression has become a metaphor for the use of sport as a diplomatic tool.

Explanation: The Anschluss ("annexation" in German) refers to the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, which had taken place on March 12, 1938. The plebiscite of April 10 aimed to retrospectively legitimize this annexation. Officially, 99.7% of Austrians reportedly voted "yes", but this result, obtained under pressure and without real freedom of vote, is not considered representative. The Anschluss was declared null and void by the Allies after the Second World War.