April 19 · This Day in America
At dawn on April 19, 1775, Captain John Parker lines up some seventy militiamen on Lexington Green as British regulars march in. He tells them to stand their ground but not to fire first. Someone fires — no one knows who, then or now. When the smoke clears, eight Americans are dead on the grass. The regulars push on to Concord, and there, at the North Bridge, the militia who have been gathering all morning fire back on purpose. Three British soldiers fall. Ralph Waldo Emerson would later call it the shot heard round the world. The march back to Boston becomes a twelve-mile gauntlet, the column hounded from behind every wall and tree by men who an hour before had been farmers. By nightfall the empire has learned something it cannot unlearn: these people will shoot back. The war has begun, and so has the country.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1995
On the morning of April 19, 1995, a truck bomb tears the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight people are killed, nineteen of them children in a daycare. It is the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history. The rescue went on for weeks; the grief, far longer. Today a field of 168 empty chairs glows on the ground where the building stood, each one a name, each one lit after dark.
Source: www.nps.gov
“Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”Capt. John Parker, Lexington Green, April 19, 1775 (as recorded by tradition)