#Middlebury #MomentsInTime
On April 18, 1775, as British troops march out of Boston on a mission to confiscate the American arsenal at Concord, Mass., patriots Paul Revere and William Dawes set out on horseback to sound the alarm. Early on the morning of April 19, a British patrol captured Revere and briefly questioned him.- On April 16, 1789, newly elected President George Washington leaves his Mount Vernon, Va., home and heads for New York, to be sworn in as the first American president. Washington had admitted that he would have preferred to stay in retirement.
- On April 22, 1889, at precisely high noon, some 50,000 to 60,000 would-be settlers make a mad dash into the newly opened Oklahoma Territory to claim cheap land. Towns like Norman, Oklahoma City, Kingfisher and Guthrie sprang up almost overnight.
- On April 21, 1953, two of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s chief aides return to the U.S. after a controversial investigation of United States Information Service posts in Europe. As a result, thousands of books were ordered removed from USIS libraries. Authors targeted included Dashiell Hammett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck and Henry Thoreau.
- On April 20, 1978, Soviet aircraft force a Korean Air Lines passenger jet to land on a frozen lake after the jet veers into Russian airspace. A civilian American aircraft later retrieved the survivors.
- On April 19, 1993, at Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, the FBI launches a tear-gas assault on the Branch Davidian compound, ending a tense 51-day standoff with the religious cult. The compound was burned to the ground, and some 80 Branch Davidians perished in the inferno.
- On April 17, 2002, ABC airs the 10,000th episode of the daytime drama “General Hospital,” the network’s longest-running soap opera. The show premiered on April 1, 1963.
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