April 19, 1775: At about 5 a.m., 700 British troops, on a mission
to capture Patriot leaders and seize a Patriot arsenal, march into Lexington to find 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the town’s common green.

Suddenly, a shot was fired from an undetermined gun, and a cloud
of musket smoke soon covered the green. When the brief Battle of Lexington ended, eight Americans lay dead or dying and 10 others
were wounded.

         
British Major John Pitcairn     Captain John Parker

On March 19, 2003, the United States, along with coalition
forces primarily from the United Kingdom, initiated war on
Iraq. Just after explosions began to rock Baghdad, Iraq’s
capital, U.S. President George W. Bush announced in a
televised address, “At this hour, American and coalition
forces are in the early stages of military operations to
disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world
from grave danger.”

President Bush and his advisors built much of their case
for war on the specious claim that Iraq, under dictator
Saddam Hussein, possessed or was in the process of
building weapons of mass destruction.

No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. The
U.S. declared an end to the war in Iraq on December 15,
2011, nearly ten years after the fighting began. 

President George Bush (right) speaks to Donald Rumsfeld
and Paul Wolfowitz during a visit at the Pentagon on March
25, 2003.

On January 5, 1933, construction began on the Golden Gate
Bridge, as workers began excavating 3.25 million cubic feet
of dirt for the structure’s huge anchorages.

On May 27, 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was opened, Celebrations lasted for a week! Vehicles were not permitted to cross on the first
day, so 200,000 people made their way across the bridge on foot
or roller skaters. The day after it opened, President Roosevelt, who
was in Washington D.C., had pushed a button that allowed vehicles across the bridge.