The Oklahoma City bombing occurred when a truck packed with explosives was detonated on April 19, 1995, outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, leaving 168 people dead and hundreds more injured. The blast was set off by anti-government militant ...read more

At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two teens went on a shooting spree on April 20, 1999, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. The Columbine shooting was, at the time, the worst high school ...read more

In April 1992, the government of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated atrocious crimes against Bosniak (Bosnian ...read more

The Waco Siege began in early 1993, when a government raid on a compound near Waco, Texas, led to a 51-day standoff between federal agents and members of a millennial Christian sect called the Branch Davidians. The siege ended dramatically on April 19, 1993, when fires consumed ...read more

The Los Angeles riots sprung from years of rising tensions between the LAPD and the city’s African Americans, highlighted by the 1991 videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King. On April 29, 1992, anger boiled over after four LAPD officers were found not guilty of assaulting ...read more

For many people in the United States, the late 1970s were a troubled and troubling time. The radical and countercultural movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War, uncertainty in the Middle East and economic crisis at home had undermined ...read more

At the beginning of the 1930s, more than 15 million Americans–fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers–were unemployed. President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans needed to get them through this ...read more

“America at this moment,” said the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1945, “stands at the summit of the world.” During the 1950s, it was easy to see what Churchill meant. The United States was the world’s strongest military power. Its economy was booming, and the ...read more