April 18 in History

In the early morning of April 18, 1906, a powerful earthquake struck the northern California coast, rupturing the San Andreas Fault and devastating San Francisco. The shaking itself caused serious damage, but the fires that followed destroyed much more of the city. Estimates of the death toll have risen over the years, and modern historians generally believe that more than 3,000 people died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history. It also became a landmark event in the science of earthquakes.

In April 1951, six European countries signed the Treaty of Paris, creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany agreed to pool their coal and steel production under a shared authority. The arrangement is widely regarded as the first step toward what is now the European Union, and it was designed with a political goal as much as an economic one: to make another war between France and Germany "materially impossible," as the Schuman Declaration put it.

In April 1955, delegates from 29 African and Asian countries gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, for the first large-scale international conference of states from the two continents, held without the participation of the Western powers or the Soviet Union. Its importance lies in the message it sent: that newly independent and still-colonized peoples intended to shape world affairs on their own terms rather than be treated as pawns in the Cold War. It is often seen as a forerunner of the Non-Aligned Movement, though that movement was formally founded later.

Zimbabwe became an independent state in April 1980, ending nearly a century of white-dominated colonial and minority rule in the territory previously known as Rhodesia. The transition created a majority-ruled republic, brought Robert Mugabe to power as its first prime minister, and marked one of the last major steps in the decolonization of southern Africa.