From Sept. 11 To The Beatles' British Invasion: How We Remember Our First News Events

If someone asked you where you were and what you were doing on a certain day, would you know? Could you give them exact details and describe how the day progressed? For most people, the answer is probably no, but there are some days that are unforgettable for one reason or another. For those days, it's likely that you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing.

For many millennials, Sept. 11, 2001, is the first time they paid attention to the news. They can tell you how old they were at the time, who their teacher was that year, what happened as parents started coming to school to take their kids home, and recount over and over again how images of the towers collapsing are seared into their minds. That day, and the months and years that followed, a lot of millennials became more aware of the world — and our country's place in it — through news coverage.

Undoubtedly, the attacks that took place that day are also unforgettable for people of different generations, however they also have their own first memories of a news event. But for those generations, we wondered if there was a common event that stood out for each of them, or if there was one event everyone would remember. We wanted to know, so we asked.

It turns out there's no one major event for each generation. Still, a lot of the events were historic milestones that had a lasting effect on the country and, at times, the world.

The Columbine Shooting

April 20, 1999

When Brynn Hoffman was a sixth-grader, her older sister was a freshman at Columbine High School, which was about a quarter of a mile away from the family's home in Littleton, Colo. On April 20, 1999, Hoffman remembers her teacher getting a panicked phone call from her daughter, who was a journalist. Reports were coming in about a shooting at the high school, but at the time, no one knew exactly what was happening.

Eventually Hoffman's school went into lockdown mode. Three hours later her mom came to pick up her and her brother up from school, and her sister was in the car. She had been in one of the first groups to get out of Columbine, where two students killed 13 people before killing themselves.

"We went home and we were very close to the high school, and so we had all of the news coverage and I remember watching it on the TV and everyone trying to figure out what was happening and what was going on because they just didn't have any context for it, they just didn't know what was going on," Hoffman says.

She says the news coverage