Since 1897, the city of Boston in the US State of Massachusetts holds a marathon that is 26.2 miles long and can take over 4 hours to complete. The marathon is held around Patriots Day which commemorates the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord which kick-started the American Revolutionary War that led to the birth of an independent United States of America. Apart from an obvious gap year in 2020, the marathon is held annually in Boston.

On 15 April 2013 at 2:49PM EST, the annual Boston Marathon was devastated by 2 terrorist bombs that detonated within 190m apart from each other within close proximity to the finish line. The perpetrators of the bombing were two brothers, one from the Russian state of Chechnya and the other from Kyrgyzstan, a former soviet republic. Following his brother_Tamerlan's death after being shot and sustaining blunt force trauma, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev disclosed during investigations that the motive was revenge on the US for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where American soldiers had been deployed since the September 11 Attacks (which was caused by people who were not from these countries). The surviving Tsarnaev brother was initially given the death penalty but as of 15 April 2023, he is now serving a life sentence.
While the marathon continued until 2:59PM when all the runners had crossed the finish line, 3 people perished that day and 281 people were injured that day. A film was made based on the events of the bombing called Patriots Day which came out just a short 3 years after the bombing. This event also saw the pulling of a March 2013 episode of the adult animation Family Guy called Turban Cowboy (S11 E15) that made references to a number of fatalities occouring at a marathon.