TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: AUGUST 18
1587 In the Roanoke Island colony, Ellinor and Ananias Dare become parents of a baby girl whom they name Virginia, the first English child born in what would become the United States.
1612 The Pendle witch trials begin. 11 people – 9 women and 2 men – are tried for practicing witch craft in one of UK’s most well documented and followed witch trials. The trial lasts for two days and 10 of the accused are found guilty and executed on August 20.
1735 The “Evening Post” of Boston, MA, was published for the first time.
1737 First public admittance to the Salon de Paris art exhibition at the Louvre in Paris
1877 Martian Moon Phobos is Discovered
1894 Congress creates Bureau of Immigration
1898 Adolph Ochs takes over the New York Times, saying his aim is to give “the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is permissible in good society, and give it early, if not earlier, than it can be learned through any other medium.”
1914 Germany declares war on Russia while President Woodrow Wilson issues his Proclamation of Neutrality.
1919 Anti-Cigarette League of America forms in Chicago, Illinois
1958 Lolita is First Published in the US
1963 James Meredith, the first African American to attend University of Mississippi, graduates.
1965 Operation Starlite marks the beginning of major U.S. ground combat operations in Vietnam.
1974 Luna 24, the USSR’s final major lunar exploration mission, soft-lands on moon.
1979 Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini demands a “Saint War” against Kurds.
1987 Ohio nurse Donald Harvey sentenced to triple life terms for poisoning 24 patients.
1991 A group of hard-line communist leaders unhappy with the drift toward the collapse of the Soviet Union seize control of the government in Moscow and place President Mikhail S. Gorbachev under house arrest
1992 Dennis Rader, the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) killer receives 10 consecutive life sentences. He had terrorized Wichita, Kansas, murdering 10 people between 1974 and 1991.
2004 Donald Trump unveiled his board game (TRUMP the Game) where players bid on real estate, buy big ticket items and make billion-dollar business deals.
2005 Indonesia suffers a Massive Power Outage. Thought to be one of the biggest power outages in recent history, the Java-Bali outage affected about 100 million people. Electricity was restored to most areas within 6 hours.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
