April 19, 2015 marks 240 years since the bloodshed that ignited the American Revolutionary War and the birth of the United States. The violence started at Lexington, continued at Concord, and carried on along the “Battle Road.” The Shot Heard Round The World.
April 19th. 1995 : A truck full of explosives destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people.
If we anons were alive back then, you know where we would have been. You just know it. April 19, 1775
https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/april-19/
On April 19, 1775, British and American soldiers exchanged fire in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord. On the night of April 18, the royal governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, commanded by King George III to suppress the rebellious Americans, had ordered 700 British soldiers, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith and Marine Major John Pitcairn, to seize the colonists’ military stores in Concord, some 20 miles west of Boston.
A system of signals and word-of-mouth communication set up by the colonists was effective in forewarning American volunteer militia men of the approach of the British troops. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” tells how a lantern was displayed in the steeple of Christ Church on the night of April 18, 1775, as a signal to Paul Revere and others.
At Lexington Green, the British were met by approximately seventy American Minute Men led by John Parker. At the North Bridge in Concord, the British were confronted again, this time by 300 to 400 armed colonists, and were forced to march back to Boston with the Americans firing on them all the way. By the end of the day, the colonists were singing “Yankee Doodle” and the American Revolution had begun.