It is rather astounding how much has happened on April 29. Luckily, we have a way to describe that, owing to the April 29, 1852 publication of the first edition of British lexicographer Peter Mark Roget’s thesaurus. April 29 is a huge, great, gigantic, enormous, massive, colossal, mammoth, immense, stupendous, tremendous date in history.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.