What to remember about April 18th…
- 1521 Martin Luther defies Holy Roman Emperor Charles V by refusing to recant his writings during his trial for heresy
- 1775 British troops march out of Boston to confiscate the American arsenal at Concord and to capture Patriot leaders at Lexington; Patriots Paul Revere and William Dawes set out on horseback from the city to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock
- 1864 Confederate troops overwhelm Union supply train guarded by all black 1st Kansas Infantry; no black soldier left alive by rebel troops
- 1906 At 5:13 a.m., an 8.0 earthquake strikes San Francisco, California; 3000 will die in from subsequent fires and 30,000 buildings lost
- 1912 705 survivors of lost RMS Titanic arrive back in New York
- 1923 Yankee Stadium opens in New York City; the “house that Ruth built” will be home to the team until 2008
- 1942 Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle leads raid 1st ever raid of Japanese mainland; 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers launched secretly from aircraft carrier USS Hornet; all bombers lost afterwards and 3 crew killed
- 1945 Pulitzer Prize winning American war correspondent Ernie Pyle is killed by Japanese machine gun fire on Le Shima, Okinawa in the Pacific (b. 1900)
- 1955 While preparing speech to celebrate 7th anniversary of State of Israel, German-American physicist Albert Einstein dies (b. 1879)
- 1961 President Kennedy denies U.S. involvement in failed Bay of Pigs invasion of communist Cuba
- 1983 Muslim homicide bomber kills 63 in attack on U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon; pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad branch of Hezbollah responsible
- 1988 In response to Iranian mining of Persian Gulf and damage to USS Roberts, U.S. Navy begins Operation Praying Mantis as retaliation
- 2007 Supreme Court of the United States upholds Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 in Gonzales v. Carhart
