TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MAY 18
526 St. John I ends his reign as Catholic Pope.
1291 Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil and his forces take the last Christian stronghold of Acre
1302 The weaver Peter de Coningk led a massacre of the Flemish oligarchs.
1642 The city of Montreal was founded by the French.
1643 Queen Anne, the widow of Louis XIII, is granted sole and absolute power as regent by the Paris parliament, overriding the late king’s will.
1652 A law is passed in Rhode Island banning slavery in the colonies but it causes little stir and seems unlikely to be enforced.
1798 The first Secretary of the U.S. Navy was appointed. He was Benjamin Stoddert.
1804 Napoleon Bonaparte becomes the Emperor of France.
1896 The Supreme Court affirmed racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson as “separate but equal.”
1917 The U.S. Congress passes the Selective Service act, calling up soldiers to fight World War I.
1921 Following a case of Typhus Ellis Island has been under quarantine. More than 1,700 immigrants who may have come in contact are also in quarantine while the island is fumigated and cleaned up , it will several days before the island is opened again for immigration.
1927 45 people die in the United States’ worst school massacre
In the Bath school disaster, a disgruntled school board member set off several bombs at the Bath Consolidated School and other locations in Michigan.
1930 Following pressure from the temperance movement, President Hoover has recommended strengthening the prohibition enforcement by moving enforcement to the justice department.
1933 President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Tennessee Valley Authority Act.
1934 The U.S. Congress approved an act, known as the “Lindberg Act,” that called for the death penalty in interstate kidnapping cases.
1951 The United Nations moves its headquarters to New York city.
1974 India becomes the sixth nation to explode an atomic bomb.
1980 After rumbling for two months, Mount Saint Helens, in Washington, erupts 3 times in 24 hours.
1983 The U.S. Senate revised immigration laws and gave millions of illegal aliens legal status under an amnesty program.
1994 Israeli troops withdrew from the Gaza strip after three decades of occupation and Palestinians took over.
1998 The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and twenty U.S. states file a case that alleged that Microsoft Corp. abused it’s monopoly power in its handling of operating system sales and web browser sales.
2000 A bill was finally passed that removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse.
2009 The Sri Lankan Civil War ends
The 25-year conflict between the government and the separatist Tamil Tigers had claimed up to 100,000 lives. It ended with the Tigers’ defeat.
2012 The highest court in the US state of Maryland has ruled that same-sex divorce is legal in the state even though same-sex marriage is not yet legal. Gay marriage was made legal in the state in March but would not come into effect until January of the next year.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
