Today in History: April 16, the Virginia Tech shooting

Today is Thursday, April 16, the 106th day of 2026. There are 259 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On April 16, 2007, Seung-hui Cho, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student, killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus before taking his own life. It remains the deadliest school shooting in US history.

Also on this date:

In 1866, a crate of nitroglycerine that had been shipped from New York to California by way of Panama exploded in the Wells Fargo building in San Francisco, killing 14 people and shattering windows up to a half mile away. (The blast prompted passage of a federal law banning shipments of explosives on passenger vessels.)

In 1917, Vladimir Lenin, after being exiled to Europe, returned to Russia by train to take command of the Russian Revolution that would overthrow a provisional government, install communism and bring about the rise of the Soviet Union.

In 1945, a Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea torpedoed the ship MV Goya, which Germany was using to transport civilian refugees and wounded soldiers. As many as 7,000 people died as the ship broke apart and sank minutes after being struck.

In 1947, the French cargo ship Grandcamp, carrying over 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate, blew up in the harbor of Texas City, Texas. A nearby ship, the High Flyer, which was carrying ammonium nitrate and sulfur, caught fire and exploded the following day. The combined blasts and fires killed nearly 600 people and injured 5,000 in the worst industrial accident in U.S. history.

In 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which the civil rights activist responded to a group of local clergymen who had criticized him for leading street protests. King defended his tactics, writing,...