This was the scene when San Francisco was devastated by the great earthquake and fire on April 18, 1906. Scene looks down Sacramento Street. Property loss was close to $350 million. More than 60,000 buildings, half of them homes, were shattered or burned. Some 265,000 of the 360,000 residents were homeless. (AP Photo/Arnold Genthe)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 18, 2024
On April 18, 1906, the deadliest earthquake in U.S. history struck San Francisco, followed by raging fires across the city. More than 3,000 people are believed to have been killed by the quake, which was estimated to have reached as high as 8.3 magnitude on the Richter scale.
In 1775, Paul Revere began his famous ride from Charlestown to Lexington, Massachusetts, warning colonists that British Regular troops were approaching.
In 1942, in the first World War II attack on the Japanese mainland, 16 U.S. Army Air Force B-25 bombers conducted an air raid, led by Lt. Col. James Doolittle, over Tokyo and several other Japanese cities.
In 1955, physicist Albert Einstein died in Princeton, New Jersey, at age 76.
In 1978, the Senate approved the Panama Canal Treaty, providing for the complete turnover of control of the waterway to Panama on the last day of 1999.
In 1983, 63 people, including 17 Americans, were killed at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, by a suicide bomber driving a van laden with explosives.
In 2015, a ship carrying migrants from Africa sank in the Mediterranean off Libya. As many as 700 people are believed to have drowned.
In 2016, “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop stage biography of America’s first treasury secretary, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
In 2019, the final report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was made public. It outlined Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election but “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
In 2023, Fox and Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787.5 million settlement in the voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit, averting a trial in a case that exposed how the top-rated network promoted falsehoods regarding the 2020 presidential election.
