April 18- Earthquake in San Francisco

April 18 is the 108th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (109th in leap years). There are 257 days remaining.

From:

Wikipedia

310    

St. Eusebius begins his reign as Catholic Pope.

Eusebius of Caesarea (~275 � May 30, 339) (often called Eusebius Pamphili, "Eusebius [the friend] of Pamphilus") was a bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and is often referred to as the father of church history because of his work in recording the history of the early Christian church. An earlier history by Hegesippus that he referred to has not survived.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebius

1521    

Martin Luther confronts the emperor Charles V, refusing to retract the views which led to his excommunication.

Emperor Charles V opened the imperial Diet of Worms on January 22, 1521. Luther was summoned to renounce or reaffirm his views and was given an imperial guarantee of safe conduct to ensure his safe passage.

On April 16, Luther appeared before the Diet. Johann Eck, an assistant of Archbishop of Trier, presented Luther with a table filled with copies of his writings. Eck asked Luther if the books were his and if he still believed what these works taught. Luther requested time to think about his answer. It was granted. Luther prayed, consulted with friends and mediators and presented himself before the Diet the next day. When the matter came before the Diet the next day, Counsellor Eck asked Luther to plainly answer the question: "Would Luther reject his books and the errors they contain?" Luther replied: "Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason�I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other�my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe." According to tradition, Luther is then said to have spoken these words: "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen".

Over the next few days, private conferences were held to determine Luther's fate. Before a decision was reached, Luther left Worms. During his return to Wittenberg, he disappeared.

The Emperor issued the Edict of Worms on May 25, 1521, declaring Martin Luther an outlaw and a heretic and banning his literature.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther

1676    Sudbury, Massachusetts is attacked by Indians.

1775    American revolutionaries Paul Revere and William Dawes ride though the towns of Massachusetts warning that "the British are coming."

1791    National Guardsmen prevent Louis XVI and his family from leaving Paris.

1818    

A regiment of Indians and blacks is defeated at the Battle of Suwanna, in Florida, ending the first Seminole War.

The First Seminole War was started with the invasion of East Florida by U.S. Army forces under the command of General Andrew Jackson. White settlers had previously attacked had retaliated. The presence of runaway slaves and maroons living among the Seminoles, a community known to historians today as the Black Seminoles, was another sore point. Some historians date the commencement of the war to an attack on the Black Seminoles at Apalachicola, at the so-called Negro Fort, which was razed in July 1816. More conventionally, the war is dated from the arrival of Jackson in December 1817. Jackson's forces captured St. Mark's on April 7 and Pensacola on May 24, 1818. The largest battle of the war, an engagement on the Suwannee River, was primarily between U.S. and black warriors. Jackson's overall campaign scattered but did not destroy the Black Seminole maroon settlements of Florida, led to the confinement of the Seminole Indians within a constricted area of the interior, and secured American control of East Florida, still nominally claimed by Spain.

In 1818, James Monroe's Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defined the American position on this issue. Adams accused Spain of breaking the Pinckney treaty by failing to control the Se�minoles, and refused to apologize for Jackson's actions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Seminole_War

1834    William Lamb becomes prime minister of England.

1838    The Wilkes' expedition to the South Pole sets sail.

1847    U.S. forces defeat Mexicans at Cerro Gordo in one of the bloodiest battle of the war.

1853    The first train in Asia begins running from Bombay to Tanna.

1861    Colonel Robert E. Lee turns down an offer to command the Union armies.

1906    

A massive earthquake hits San Francisco, measuring 8.25 on the Richter scale.

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a major earthquake that struck San Francisco, California on the early morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906. It has been estimated at approximately 7.8 on the Richter Scale. Foreshocks and the main quake occurred at about 5:12am along the San Andreas Fault, with an epicenter close to the city. Tremors were felt from Oregon to Los Angeles, and inland as far as central Nevada. The earthquake and subsequent fire would go down as one of the worst natural disasters to hit a major city in the history of the United States, comparable in devastation to the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and Hurricane Katrina.

At the time only 478 deaths were reported; the figure was concocted by government officials who felt that reporting the true death toll would hurt real estate prices and efforts to rebuild the city. Furthermore, hundreds of casualties in Chinatown went ignored and unrecorded due to racism at the time. This figure has been revised to today's conservative estimate of 3000+. Some have put it as high as 6000. Most of the deaths occurred in San Francisco itself, but 189 were reported elsewhere across the San Francisco Bay Area. Other places in the Bay Area such as Santa Rosa, San Jose, and Stanford University also suffered severe damage.

Between 225,000 and 300,000 people were left homeless, out of a population of about 400,000. Half of the refugees fled across the bay to Oakland. Newspapers at the time described Golden Gate Park, the Panhandle, and the beaches between Ingleside and North Beach being covered with makeshift tents.

The earthquake and fire would leave a long-standing and significant impression on the development of California. At the time of the disaster, San Francisco had been the ninth-largest city in the United States and the largest on the West Coast, with a population of about 410,000. Over a period of 60 years, the city had become the financial, trade and cultural center of the Western United States; operated the busiest port on the West Coast; and was the "gateway to the Pacific", through which growing US economic and military power was projected into the Pacific and Asia. Over 80% of the city was destroyed by the earthquake and fire. Though San Francisco would rebuild quickly, the disaster would divert trade, industry and population growth south, to Los Angeles, which during the 20th century would become the largest and most important urban area in the Western United States. However, the 1908 Lawson Report, a study of the 1906 quake, showed that the very same San Andreas Fault which had caused the disaster in San Francisco ran close to Los Angeles as well.

The earthquake was the first natural disaster of its magnitude to be documented by photography and motion picture footage. Furthermore, it occurred at a time when the science of seismology was blossoming. The overall cost of the damage from the earthquake was estimated at the time to be around $400,000,000.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_earthquake

1937    

Leon Trotsky calls for the overthrow of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Moscow show trial of the so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" was staged in front of an international audience. During the trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 other accused, most of them prominent Old Bolsheviks, confessed to having plotted with Trotsky to kill Stalin and other members of the Soviet leadership. The court found everybody guilty and sentenced the defendants to death, Trotsky in absentia. The second show trial of Karl Radek, Grigory Sokolnikov, Yuri Pyatakov and 14 others took place in January 1937, with even more alleged conspiracies and crimes linked to Trotsky. In April 1937, an independent "Commission of Inquiry" into the charges made against Trotsky and others at the "Moscow Trials" was held in Coyoacan, with John Dewey as chairman. The findings were published in the book Not Guilty.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotsky

1942    

James H. Doolittle bombs Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel on January 2, 1942, and went to Headquarters Army Air Force to plan the first aerial raid on the Japanese homeland. He volunteered and received Gen. H.H. Arnold's approval to lead the attack of 16 B-25 medium bombers from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, with targets in Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya. The daring one-way mission on April 18, 1942 electrified the world and gave America's war hopes a terrific lift. As did the others who participated in the mission, Doolittle had to bail out, but fortunately landed in a heap of dung (saving a previously injured ankle from breaking) in a rice paddy in China near Chu Chow. He was helped by Chinese guerilla warriors until he could get back to the US. Some of the other fliers lost their lives on the mission.

Doolittle received the Medal of Honor, presented to him by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House, for planning and leading the successful operation. His citation reads: "For conspicuous leadership above and beyond the call of duty, involving personal valor and intrepidity at an extreme hazard to life. With the apparent certainty of being forced to land in enemy territory or to perish at sea, Lt. Col. Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers, manned by volunteer crews, in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland."

The Doolittle Raid is viewed by historians as a major public-relations victory for the United States. Although the amount of damage done to Japanese war industry was minor and quickly fixed, the raid showed the Japanese their homeland was not invulnerable, and forced them to withdraw several front-line fighter units for homeland defense. More significantly, Japanese commanders considered the raid deeply embarrassing, and their attempt to close the perceived gap in their Pacific defense perimeter led directly to the decisive American victory during the Battle of Midway.

When asked where the Tokyo raid came from, President Roosevelt said that it was based in Shangri-La.

Doolittle was portrayed by Spencer Tracy in the 1944 film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and by Alec Baldwin in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, in which the Doolittle raid was included.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Doolittle

1943    Traveling in a bomber, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor, is shot down by American P-38 fighters.

1946    

The League of Nations dissolves.

The League was powerless and mostly silent in the face of major events leading to World War II such as Hitler's re-militarisation of the Rhineland, occupation of the Sudetenland and annexation of Austria. As with Japan, both Germany in 1933 � using the failure of the World Disarmament Conference to agree to arms parity between France and Germany as a pretext � and Italy in 1937 simply withdrew from the League rather than submit to its judgment. The League commissioner in Danzig was unable to deal with German claims on the city, a significant contributing factor in the outbreak of World War II in 1939. The final significant act of the League was to expel the Soviet Union in December 1939 after it invaded Finland.

With the onset of World War II, it was clear that the League had failed in its purpose � to avoid any future world war. During the war, neither the League's Assembly nor Council was able or willing to meet, and its secretariat in Geneva was reduced to a skeleton staff, with many offices moving to North America.

After its failure to prevent one war, it was decided to create a new body to fulfill the League's role, but to take it further. This body was to be the United Nations. Many League bodies, for instance the International Labour Organisation, continued to function and eventually became affiliated with the UN. At a meeting of the Assembly in 1946, the League dissolved itself and its services, mandates, and property were transferred to the UN.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League_of_Nations

1949    The Republic of Ireland withdraws from British Commonwealth.

1950    The first transatlantic jet passenger trip is completed.

1954    Colonel Nasser seizes power in Egypt.

1978    The U.S. Senate approves the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama.

1980    Zimbabwe's (Rhodesia) formal independence from Britain is proclaimed.

1983    A suicide bomber kills U.S. Marines at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon.


Born on April 18

1480    Lucretia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI and a patron of the arts.
1817    George Henry Lewes, philosophical writer.
1857    Clarence S. Darrow, lawyer.
1864    Richard Harding Davis, journalist.
1918    Clifton Keith Hillegass, founder of the study guides known as Cliff's Notes.
1940    Ed Garvey, labor leader.

http://www.historynet.com/tih/tih0418/