Find out how our national pastime may have saved lives during the San Francisco Bay Area’s deadly earthquake of 1989.

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The inner harbor of San Francisco was built on a ship graveyard in the late 1800s.

After the 1906 earthquake destroyed the city, plans to rebuild didn’t include a place for Chinese immigrants. Faced with the prospect of resettling to Oakland, Look Tin Eli employed white architects to create an even grander Chinatown.

The great San Francisco earthquake killed 3,000 people, Paul Revere's midnight ride took place, physicist, Albert Einstein died, and play ball began a Yankees and Red Sox game for the first time in This Day in History video. The date is April 18th. Paul Revere's ride resulted in the battles of Lexington and Concord and signaled the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

As Haiti copes with the aftermath of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck its capital of Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010, a report from the U.S. Geological Survey on January 15 details the scope of the devastation.

On May 12, 2008, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake shook eastern Sichuan, China, killing thousands. It was the country’s worst natural disaster in three decades. A report from the National Earthquake Information Center moments after the quake describes the situation as preliminary news rolls in. The quake, originally thought to be a 7.8, was later upgraded.