Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/April 12

This is a list of selected April 12 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← April 11	April 13 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• Space Shuttle Columbia
  Space Shuttle Columbia
• 
  Space Shuttle Columbia
• STS-1 Crew Patch
  STS-1 Crew Patch
• 
  Space Shuttle Columbia launching
• 
  Union Flag, 1606 version
• 
  Stained glass portrait of King Edwin of Northumbria
• 
  Yuri Gagarin
• 
  Bombardment of Fort Sumter

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
467 – Anthemius was proclaimed Western Roman Emperor at the third or twelfth mile from Rome.	refimprove section
1204 – Alexios V Doukas fled Constantinople as forces under Boniface the Marquess of Montferrat and Enrico Dandolo the Doge of Venice entered and sacked the Byzantine capital, effectively ending the Fourth Crusade.	refimprove section
1606 – A royal decree established the Union Jack to symbolise the Union of the Crowns, merging the designs of the Flag of England and the Flag of Scotland.	unreferenced sections, refimprove section
1927 – Chinese Civil War: A large-scale purge of communists from the nationalist Kuomintang began in Shanghai.	needs more footnotes
1961 – Aboard Vostok 3KA-3, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter outer space, completing one orbit in a time of 108 minutes.	refimprove sectionn
1980 – Samuel Doe took control of Liberia in a coup d'etat, overthrowing President William R. Tolbert, Jr. and ending over 130 years of national democratic presidential succession.	needs more footnotes
1981 – Columbia, the first spaceworthy space shuttle, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its first flight.	refimprove section
1990 – Jim Gary became the only sculptor to present a solo show at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., featuring his trademark dinosaur sculptures made of automobile parts.	unreferenced section
1992 – Disneyland Paris, the first Walt Disney Park in Europe, opened in the Paris suburb of Marne-la-Vallée.	refimprove section
1994 – Husband-and-wife law partners Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel posted the first massive commercial Usenet spam.	refimprove section

Eligible

• 240 – Shapur I was crowned shahanshah ("king of kings") of the Sasanian Empire, the last Iranian empire before the rise of Islam.
• 627 – King Edwin of Northumbria was converted to Christianity by Bishop Paulinus of York, who had previously saved his life.
• 1782 – American Revolutionary War: The Royal Navy defeated a French fleet in the Battle of the Saintes, forcing the latter to abandon a planned invasion of Jamaica.
• 1861 – Confederate forces began firing at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, starting the American Civil War.

Notes

• Disney's Animal Kingdom appears on April 22, so Disneyland Paris should not be used in the same year.

April 12: Yuri's Night; Cosmonautics Day in Russia

Terry Fox

• 1776 – The fourth North Carolina Provincial Congress passed the Halifax Resolves, the first official action in the American colonies calling for independence from Britain during the American Revolution.
• 1831 – Broughton Suspension Bridge in Manchester, England, collapsed, reportedly because of mechanical resonance induced by troops marching in step over the bridge.
• 1910 – SMS Zrínyi, one of the last pre-dreadnoughts built by the Austro-Hungarian Navy, was launched.
• 1980 – Terry Fox (pictured) dipped his artificial leg in the Atlantic Ocean at St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, and began running his "Marathon of Hope" towards the Pacific Ocean at Vancouver, British Columbia, to raise funds across Canada for cancer research.
• 2007 – The canteen of the Council of Representatives of Iraq building was attacked by a suicide bomber, killing one Member of Parliament and wounding 23 other people.

Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood (d. 1866) · Beverly Cleary (b. 1916) · Xin Fengxia (d. 1998)

More anniversaries:

• April 11
• April 12
• April 13