On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere began his famous midnight ride from Charlestown to Lexington, Massachusetts, warning the American colonists that British troops were approaching.

In 1906, the deadliest earthquake in U.S. history struck San Francisco, followed by raging fires across the city.

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 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, in an attack by a suicide bomber driving a van laden with explosives.