American Revolution begins at Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775
American Revolution begins at Battle of Lexington: 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. British Major John Pitcairn ordered the outnumbered Patriots to disperse, and after a moment’s hesitation the Americans began to drift off the 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. Only one British soldier was injured, but the American Revolution had begun.
By 1775, tensions between the American colonies and the British government approached the breaking point, especially in Massachusetts, where Patriot leaders formed a shadow revolutionary government and trained militias to prepare for armed conflict with the British troops occupying Boston. In the spring of 1775, General Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, received instructions from England to seize all stores of weapons and gunpowder accessible to the American insurgents. On April 18, he ordered British troops to march against the Patriot arsenal at Concord and capture Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, known to be hiding at Lexington.
The Boston Patriots had been preparing for such a military action by the British for some time, and upon learning of the British plan, Patriots Paul Revere and William Dawes were ordered to set out to rouse the militiamen and warn Adams and Hancock. When the British troops arrived at Lexington, a group of militiamen were waiting. The Patriots were routed within minutes, but warfare had begun, leading to calls to arms across the Massachusetts countryside.
When the British troops reached Concord at about 7 a.m., they found themselves encircled by hundreds of armed Patriots. They managed to destroy the military supplies the Americans had collected but were soon advanced against by a gang of minutemen, who inflicted numerous casualties. Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, the overall commander of the British force, ordered his men to return to Boston without directly engaging the Americans. As the British retraced their 16-mile journey, their lines were constantly beset by Patriot marksmen firing at them Indian-style from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls.
At Lexington, Captain Parker’s militia had its revenge, killing several British soldiers as the Red Coats hastily marched through his town. By the time the British finally reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 British soldiers had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties.
The battles of Lexington and Concord were the first battles of the American Revolution, a conflict that would escalate from a colonial uprising into a world war that, seven years later, would give birth to the independent United States of America.
SEVEN Events That Led to the American Revolution
SIX Unsung Heroes of the American Revolution
History Channel / Wikipedia / Encyclopedia Britannica
Library Of Congress.gov / Museum of the American Revolution.org / National Archives.gov / U.S. History.org / American Battlefields.org /
American Revolution begins at Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775 (YouTube) 
This Day in History April 19
• 1506 Lisbon Massacre: accused Jews are being slaughtered by Portuguese Catholics.
• 1529 Beginning of the Protestant Reformation: After the Second Diet of Speyer bans Lutheranism, a group of rulers (German: Fürst) and independent cities protests the reinstatement of the Edict of Worms.
• 1539 Treaty of Frankfurt: Truce between Protestants and the Holy Roman Emperor is signed.
• 1677 Siege of Cambrai: The French army captures the town of Cambrai held by Spanish troops.
• 1713 Pragmatic Sanction of 1713: With no living male heirs, Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor issues the Pragmatic Sanction to ensure that Habsburg lands and the Austrian throne would be inheritable by a female.
• 1770 Captain James Cook, holding the rank of lieutenant, sights the eastern coast of what is now Australia.
• 1770 Marie Antoinette marries Louis XVI of France in a proxy wedding.
• 1782 John Adams secures the Dutch Republic's recognition of the United States as an independent government. The house which he had purchased in The Hague, Netherlands becomes the first American embassy.
• 1809 Fifth Coalition: Battle of Raszyn:) Austrian main army is defeated by a First French Empire part of a four-day campaign that ended in a French victory.
• 1861 American Civil War: Baltimore riot of 1861: A pro-Secession mob in Baltimore attacks United States Army troops marching through the city.
• 1903 Kishinev Pogrom: Kishinev (Bessarabia) begins, forcing tens of thousands of Jews to later seek refuge in Palestine and the Western world.
• 1927 Shanghai Massacre of 1927: Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for her play “Sex”.
• 1917 World War I: Battle of Vimy Ridge: Canadian forces successfully complete the taking of Vimy Ridge from the Germans.
• 1934 U.S. Auto-Lite Strike: egins, culminating in a five-day melee between Ohio National Guard troops and 6,000 strikers and picketers.
• 1942 World War II: In Poland, the Majdan-Tatarski ghetto is established, situated between the Lublin Ghetto and a Majdanek subcamp.
• 1943 World War II: In Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: after German troops enter the Warsaw Ghetto to round up the remaining Jews.
• 1971 Charles Manson is sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment) for Tate–LaBianca murders.
• 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, is bombed, killing 168 people including 19 children under the age of six.
• 1999 Decision on the Capital of Germany: The German Bundestag returns to Berlin.
• 2013 Boston Marathon bombing: suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev is killed in a shootout with police. His brother Dzhokhar is later captured hiding in a boat inside a backyard in the suburb of Watertown.
• 2020 Nova Scotia attacks: A killing spree in Nova Scotia, Canada, leaves 22 people and the perpetrator dead, making it the deadliest rampage in the country's history.
