Aug. 18
Today in history
Today is Aug. 18. On this date in:
1227: Genghis Khan died at 65. Born to a minor Mongol chieftain, he united tribes by force and rose to build an empire that spanned Asia. Even after his death, his troops obeyed his order to level the kingdom of Xi Xia.
1587: The first English child, Virginia Dare, was born in the Americas. She was the first granddaughter of Roanoke Island’s English Gov. John White. By her third birthday, she had disappeared with the rest of the Roanoke colonists.
1920: The 19th Amendment was ratified, giving U.S. women the vote. Tennessee was the 36th and deciding state, approving the amendment by just one vote.
1927: Eleanor Rosalynn Smith was born in Plains, Georgia. After marrying her neighbor Jimmy Carter,
she helped run the family peanut, fertilizer and seed business; had four children; and became first lady with a focus on promoting the performing arts and mental health.
1939: Adolf Hitler established the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses, part of his Aktion T4 euthanasia program, and required midwives and doctors to fill out questionnaires about institutionalized children with disabilities.
1958: After multiple rejections by American publishers, Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel “Lolita” was published in the United States, two years after it came out in Paris. “It transmutes, as only a great book could, this diseased man,” the Nation wrote.
1962: The Fab Four performed for the first time as John, Paul, George and Ringo. Ringo Starr’s first gig drumming with the Beatles was a horticultural society’s annual dance in Birkenhead, across the Mersey River from Liverpool. The band had sacked Pete Best two days earlier.
1963: James Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi as a transfer student less than a year before, graduated with a degree in political science. His wife and son attended the ceremony. He went on to earn a law degree from Columbia University.
1964: The International Olympic Committee announced that South Africa would be barred from the summer Olympics in Tokyo due to the country’s apartheid policies that segregated sports. The country would not be allowed back until 1992, after it repealed all apartheid laws.
1969: The Woodstock Music and Art Fair ended in Bethel, New York. Organizer Max Yasgur told the crowd they had proven to the world “that half a million kids can get together for fun and music and have nothing but fun and music.”
1990: President George H. W. Bush signed the Ryan White CARE Act, funding services for low-income people with HIV and AIDS. White, a teenager, became an AIDS activist after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion for hemophilia. He had died in April, shortly before his high school graduation.
1991: Four of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s top officials demanded that he turn power over to his vice president. When he refused, they put him under house arrest. The next morning, they announced the vice president had taken over in a coup.
– USA TODAY Network
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, August 18
