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“That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as anothers. We see so much only as we possess.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
Wikiquote (Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist.)
December 18th, 218 BC
Roman Empire:
218 BC - Second Punic War; Battle of the Trebia - Hannibal's Carthaginian forces defeat those of the Roman Republic.
Wikipedia Photo: ● Ancient roman statue ● Detail of Head from Roman Statue of Antinous, credit Corbis ● Statue of Neptune, Trevi Fountain, Rome ● International Sand Sculpture Festival, FIESA 7 ancient Rome.
Relief from a 3rd-century sarcophagus depicting a battle between Romans and Germanic warriors; the central figure is perhaps the emperor Hostilian / Depiction of the Menorah on the Arch of Titus in Rome.
December 18th, 1271
Mongol Empire:
Kublai Khan renames his empire "Yuan" (元 yuán), officially marking the start of the Yuan Dynasty of Mongolia and China.
Wikipedia Image: Map of Mongol Empire at its height; Genghis Khan, credit The Field Museum in Chicago; Genghis Khan various Mongolian tribes joined together in 1206; Mongol warriors was created for an Islamic history book, Rashid al-Din's History of the World of 1307, courtesy of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland.
December 18th, 1642
Dutch explorer Abel Tasman becomes first European to land in New Zealand.
Wikipedia Photo: Australian satellite (Tasmania, the 26th largest island in the world, and the surrounding 334 islands) and scenery.
Image: The Charlotte Jane and the Randolph bring the first of the Canterbury Pilgrims to Lyttelton, New Zealand, credit Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand.
December 18th, 1777
American Revolutionary War:
1777 - The United States celebrates its first Thanksgiving, marking the recent victory by the Americans over General John Burgoyne in the Battle of Saratoga in October.
Wikipedia Paintings: Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutz; Battle of the Chesapeake, French (left) and British (right) lines; Battle of Bunker Hill, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 13, 1782, by John Singleton Copley; Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown, 1781; "The surrender at Saratoga" shows General Daniel Morgan in front of a French de Vallière 4-pounder; Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown by (John Trumbull, 1797).
December 18th, 1787
New Jersey becomes the third state to ratify the United States Constitution five days after Delaware became the first.
Wikipedia Painting: Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, by Howard Chandler Christy
December 18th, 1793
Surrender of the frigate La Lutine by French Royalists to Lord Hood; renamed HMS Lutine, she later becomes a famous treasure wreck.
Wikipedia Photo: H.M.S. Lutine leaving Yarmouth Roads, Oct. 9, 1799, on her last voyage. (From the painting by Frank Mason, R.A., in the Committee Room of Lloyd's, London.) See Chapter XI; HMS Lutine in distress., credit Gutenberg.org.
December 18th, 1878
John Kehoe, the last of the The Molly Maguires is executed in Schuylkill County and Carbon County, Pennsylvania prisons.
Wikipedia.org Photo: The The Molly Maguires was a 19th century secret society of mainly Irish-American coal miners.
December 18th, 1888
The ancient Indian ruins of Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde are discovered by Richard Wetherill.
Wikipedia Photo: Mesa Verde National Park a U.S. National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Montezuma County, Colorado, credit Sam Green, Cortez Journal.
December 18th, 1892
Premiere performance of The Nutcracker Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Saint Petersburg.
Wikipedia Image: Saint Petersburg: Panorama from Palace Bridge;
Pushkin House is established in Saint Petersburg to preserve the cultural heritage (Institute of Russian Literature, as seen from across the Neva);
Saint Petersburg, Russia. © Digital Vision / Getty Images;
Saint Isaac's Cathedral;
Winter Palace is one of the most splendid buildings in Saint Petersburg.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky by Nikolay Kuznetsov, 1893; Painting Inspired by The Nutcracker Ballet, credit Cheryl Whitestone
December 18th, 1912
Charles Dawson announces the "Piltdown Man", initially believed to be one of the most important fossilized hominid skulls ever found. The British Natural History Museum anounces the hominid skull is a hoax on November 21st, 1953.
Wikipedia Image: Group portrait by John Cooke, 1915. Back row (from left): F O Barlow, G Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Front row: A S Underwood, Arthur Keith, W P Pycraft, and Sir Ray Lankester.
December 18th, 1916
World War I:
1916 - Battle of Verdun; ends when German forces under Chief of Staff Erich Von Falkenhayn are defeated by the French, and suffer 337,000 casualties.
Wikipedia Photo: Trenches on the Western Front; a British Mark IV Tank crossing a trench; Royal Navy battleship HMS Irresistible sinking after striking a mine at the Battle of the Dardanelles; a Vickers machine gun crew with gas masks, and German Albatros D.III biplanes. National Archives and Records Administration.
December 18th, 1917
The resolution containing the language of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to enact Prohibition is passed by the United States Congress.
Wikipedia Photo: Volstead Act paves the way for Prohibition the following January, and ends on December 5th 1933 with the retification of the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution.
December 18th, 1932
Chicago Bears defeat the Portsmouth Spartans (Detroit Lions) 9-0 in the first ever NFL Championship Game.
Wikipedia Image: Chicago Bears offensive linemen Gabe Carimi, Lance Louis, Roberto Garza and Chris Spencer. (Scott Strazzante / Tribune Photo); Chicago Bears 1932 World's Champions.
December 18th, 1944
World War II:
1944 - B-29 Superfortress and 200 other aircraft of U.S. Fourteenth Air Force bomb Hankow, China, a Japanese supply base.
Wikipedia Photo: Bombing of Dresden in World War II; August Schreitmüller's sculpture 'Goodness' surveys Dresden after a firestorm started by Allied bombers in 1945.
USS Bunker Hill was hit by kamikazes piloted by Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa and another airman on 11 May 1945. 389 personnel were killed or missing from a crew of 2,600; Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa, who flew his aircraft into the USS Bunker Hill during a Kamikaze mission on 11 May 1945; Kamikaze Missions - Lt Yoshinori Yamaguchi's Yokosuka D4Y3 (Type 33 Suisei) "Judy" in a suicide dive against USS Essex. The dive brakes are extended and the non-self-sealing port wing tank is trailing fuel vapor and/or smoke 25 November 1944.
German V1 flying-bomb and V2 Rockets - Preparations for a Salvo Launch of V-2 Rockets in the Heidelager near Blizna (Poland) (1944), credit German History in Documents and Images GHDI.
Eastern Front (World War II); Germans race towards Stalingrad. August 1942; Soviet children during a German air raid in the first days of the war, June 1941, by RIA Novosti archive; Soviet sniper Roza Shanina in 1944. About 400,000 Soviet women served in front-line duty units Caucasus Mountains, winter 1942/43; Finnish ski patrol: the invisible enemy of the Soviet Army with an unlimited supply of skis; Men of the German Engineers Corps cross a river which is swollen after the first autumn rains, to strengthen bridges linking the German positions on the central front in Russia. by Keystone / Getty Images. October 1942; Russian snipers fighting on the Leningrad front during a blizzard. Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images, 1943; German soldiers surrendering to the Russians in Stalingrad, the soldier holding the white flag of surrender is dressed in white so that there could be no doubt of his intentions, a Russian soldier is on the right of the photograph. by Keystone / Getty Images, January 1943.
B-29 Superfortress; was the primary aircraft used in the American firebombing campaign against the Empire of Japan, and atomic bombings that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
December 18th, 1958
Cold War:
1958 - Project SCORE, the world's first communications satellite is launched at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Wikipedia Photo: Lockheed C-130 Hercules; RAF Menwith Hill, a large site in the United Kingdom, part of ECHELON and the UKUSA Agreement; New Zealand nuclear test, British nuclear tests near the Malden and Christmas Islands in the mid-Pacific in 1957 and 1958; Nevada nuclear tests, Nevada Division of Environmental Protection Bureau of Federal Facilities.
1958 test launch of an U.S Air Force Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), developed by Lockheed Martin.(U.S. Air Force.
December 18th, 1971
Capitol Reef National Park is established in Utah.
Wikipedia Photo: Capitol Reef National Park; Utah Striped Cliff; Brimhall Natural Bridge; Egyptian Temple, Ross Barnett, Lonely Planet; Aerial view of rocks, Beverly & Woodward Payne Anderson, Lonely Planet; Tall cliffs along Sulphur Creek Canyon, John Elk III, Lonely Planet.
December 18th, 1972
Vietnam War:
1972 - United States President Richard Nixon Henry Kissinger announces that the United States will engage North Vietnam in Operation Linebacker II, a series of Christmas bombings, after peace talks collapsed with North Vietnam on the 13th.
Wikipedia Photo: Vietnam War: Hovering U.S. Army helicopters pour machine gun fire into a tree line to cover the advance of South Vietnamese ground troops in an attack on a Viet Cong camp 18 miles north of Tay Ninh, northwest of Saigon near the Cambodian border, in Vietnam on March 1965. (AP Photo / Horst Faas) / Boston Globe
December 18th, 1997
HTML 4.0 is published by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Wikipedia Image: Internet; global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (often called TCP/IP, although not all applications use TCP) to serve billions of users worldwide.
December 18th, 1999
NASA launches into orbit the Terra platform carrying five Earth Observation instruments, including ASTER, CERES, MISR, MODIS and MOPITT.
Wikipedia Image: MOPITT (Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere) is aboard the Terra satellite. (Image: NASA).