This day in history
Today is Thursday, April 18, the 109th day of 2024. There are 257 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Actor Clive Revill is 94. Actor Robert Hooks is 87. Actor Hayley Mills is 78. Actor James Woods is 77. Actor-director Dorothy Lyman is 77. Actor Cindy Pickett is 77. Actor Rick Moranis is 71. Actor Eric Roberts is 68. Author Susan Faludi is 65. Actor Jane Leeves is 63. Talk show host Conan O’Brien is 61. Actor Eric McCormack is
61. TV chef Ludovic Lefebvre is
53. R&B singer Trina (Trina and Tamara) is 50. Actor Melissa Joan Hart is 48. Former Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera is 41. Actor America Ferrera is 40. Actor Vanessa Kirby is 36. Actor Alia Shawkat is 35. Actor Moises Arias is 30.
▶In 1775, Paul Revere began his famous ride from Charlestown to Lexington, warning colonists that British Regular troops were approaching.
▶In 1865, Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrendered to Union General William Sherman in North Carolina, bringing further closure to the Civil War, which had formally ended.
▶In 1906, a devastating earthquake struck San Francisco, followed by raging fires; estimates of the final death toll range between 3,000 and 6,000.
▶In 1923, the first game was played at the original Yankee Stadium in New York; the Yankees defeated the Boston Red Sox 4-1.
▶In 1954, Gamal Abdel Nasser seized power as he became prime minister of Egypt.
▶In 1955, physicist Albert Einstein died in Princeton, N.J., at age 76.
▶In 1965, Prudential building opened; construction began in 1960
▶In 1966, Bill Russell was named player-coach of the Boston Celtics, becoming the NBA’s first Black coach.
▶In 1978, the Senate approved the Panama Canal Treaty, providing for the 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 US Embassy in Beirut by a suicide bomber.
▶In 2002, police arrested actor Robert Blake in the shooting death of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, nearly a year earlier. (Blake was acquitted at his criminal trial and found liable for her death in a civil trial.)
▶In 2013, the FBI released surveillance camera images of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing and asked for the public’s help in identifying them, hours after President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama attended a service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. MIT officer Sean Collier was shot to death on the campus by the two suspects, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
▶In 2015, a ship believed to be carrying migrants from Africa sank in the Mediterranean off Libya; about 500 are believed to have died.
▶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 with the Russians.
▶In 2022, Russia launched a long-feared, full-scale offensive to take control of Ukraine’s east, the country’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland, where Moscow-backed separatists had been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years.
▶Last year, Fox and Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787 million settlement in the voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit in a case that exposed how the top-rated network chased viewers by promoting lies about the 2020 presidential election.