more events on September 18
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2009
The US television soap opera The Guiding Light broadcasts its final episode, ending a 72-year run that began on radio.
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1998
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is formed to coordinate unique identifying addresses for Websites worldwide.
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1980
Cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo, a Cuban, becomes the first black to be sent on a mission in space.
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1977
Voyager I takes first photo of Earth and the Moon together.
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1975
Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, is kidnapped by violent radical group SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army); she will later take part in some of the group’s militant activities and will be captured by FBI agents.
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1973
East and West Germany and The Bahamas are admitted to United Nations.
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1971
Lance Armstrong (Lance Gunderson), cyclist; won record 7 Tour De France titles but was stripped of them and banned from competitive cycling for life after it was determined he had used performance-enhancing drugs.
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1964
U.S. destroyers fire on hostile targets in Vietnam.
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1961
James Gandolfini, actor; won three Emmys, two Golden Globes and three Screen Actors Guild Awards (crime boss Tony Soprano in The Sopranos).
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UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold is killed in a plane crash while attempting to negotiate peace in the Congo.
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1960
Two thousand cheer Fidel Castro’s arrival in New York for the United Nations session.
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1951
Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson, Sr., African-American neurosurgeon.
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1948
Margaret Chase Smith becomes the first woman elected to the Senate without completing another senator’s term when she defeats Democratic opponent Adrian Scolten. Smith is also the only woman to be elected to and serve in both houses of Congress.
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1939
Frankie Avalon, singer (“Venus”) , actor (The Alamo), playwright; teen idol of 1950s-60s.
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A German U-boat sinks the British aircraft carrier Courageous, killing 500 people.
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1934
The League of Nations admits the Soviet Union.
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1929
Charles Lindbergh takes off on a 10,000 mile air tour of South America.
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1926
Joe Kubert, comic book artist (Sgt. Rock, Hawkman), inducted into Harvey Awards’ Jack Kirby Hall of Fame (1907) and Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame (1998); founder of The Kubert School.
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1923
Queen Anne of Romania.
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1914
The Irish Home Rule Bill becomes law, but is delayed until after World War I.
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1912
Maria de la Cruz, journalist, woman’s suffrage advocate; the first woman ever elected to Chile’s Senate (1953).
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1911
Russian Premier Pyotr Stolypin dies four days after being shot at the Kiev opera house by socialist lawyer Dimitri Bogroff.
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1908
Viktor Hambardzumyan, a Soviet Armenian scientist who was among the founders of theoretical astrophysics.
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1905
Greta Garbo, actress nominated for Oscars for her roles in Anna Christie and Ninotcha.
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1895
John G. Diefenbaker, prime minister of Canada from 1957 to 1963.
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1874
The Nebraska Relief and Aid Society is formed to help farmers whose crops were destroyed by grasshoppers swarming throughout the American West.
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1863
Union cavalry troops clash with a group of Confederates at Chickamauga Creek.
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1862
After waiting all day for a Union attack which never came at Antietam, Confederate General Robert E. Lee begins a retreat out of Maryland and back to Virginia.
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1850
Congress passes the second Fugitive Slave Bill into law (the first was enacted in 1793), requiring the return of escaped slaves to their owners.
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1839
John Aitken, physician and meteorologist.
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1830
Tom Thumb, the first locomotive built in the United States, loses a nine-mile race in Maryland to a horse.
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1827
John Townsend Trowbridge, poet and author of books for boys, wrote the Jack Hazzard and Toby Trafford series.
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1819
Leon Foucault, French physicist.
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1793
George Washington lays the foundation stone for the U.S. Capitol.
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1759
Quebec surrenders to the British after a battle which sees the deaths of both James Wolfe and Louis Montcalm, the British and French commanders.
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1758
James Abercromby is replaced as supreme commander of British forces after his defeat by French commander the Marquis of Montcalm at Fort Ticonderoga during the French and Indian War.
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1709
Samuel Johnson, English lexicographer, essayist, poet and moralist.