May 18
1302 - The weaver Peter de Coningk led a massacre of the Flemish oligarchs.
1642 - Montreal, Canada, was founded.
1643 - Queen Anne, the widow of Louis XIII, was granted sole and absolute power as regent by the Paris parliament, overriding the late king's will.
1652 - In Rhode Island, a law was passed that made slavery illegal in North America. It was the first law of its kind.
1792 - Russian troops invaded Poland.
1798 - The first Secretary of the U.S. Navy was appointed. He was Benjamin Stoddert.
1802 - Great Britain declared war on Napoleon's France.
1804 - Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed emperor by the French Senate.
1828 - Battle of Las Piedras ended the conflict between Uruguay and Brazil.
1896 - The U.S. Supreme court upheld the "separate but equal" policy in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. The ruling was overturned 58 years later with Brown vs. Board of Education.
1897 - A public reading of Bram Stoker's new novel, "Dracula, or, The Un-dead," was performed in London.
1904 - Brigand Raizuli kidnapped American Ion H. Perdicaris in Morocco.
1917 - The U.S. Congress passed the Selective Service act, which called up soldiers to fight in World War I.
1926 - Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished while visiting a beach in Venice, CA. She reappeared a month later with the claim that she had been kidnapped.
1931 - Japanese pilot Seiji Yoshihara crashed his plane in the Pacific Ocean while trying to be the first to cross the ocean nonstop. He was picked up seven hours later by a passing ship.
1933 - The Tennessee Valley Authority was created.
1934 - The U.S. Congress approved an act, known as the "Lindberg Act," that called for the death penalty in interstate kidnapping cases.
1942 - New York ended night baseball games for the duration of World War II.
1944 - Monte Cassino, Europe's oldest Monastic house, was finally captured by the Allies in Italy.
1949 - Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America was incorporated
1951 - The United Nations moved its headquarters to New York City.
1953 - The first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound, Jacqueline Cochran, piloted an F-86 Sabrejet over California at an average speed of 652.337 miles-per-hour.
1974 - India became the sixth nation to explode an atomic bomb.
1980 - Mt. Saint Helens erupted in Washington state. 57 people were killed and 3 billion in damage was done.
1983 - The U.S. Senate revised immigration laws and gave millions of illegal aliens legal status under an amnesty program.
1994 - Israel's three decades of occupation in the Gaza Strip ended as Israeli troops completed their withdrawal and Palestinian authorities took over.
1998 - The U.S. federal government and 20 states filed a sweeping antitrust case against Microsoft Corp., saying the computer software company had a "choke hold" on competitors which denied consumer choices by controlling 90% of the software market.
1998 - U.S. federal officials arrested more than 130 people and seized $35 million. This was the end to an investigation of money laundering being done by a dozen Mexican banks and two drug-smuggling cartels.
2012 - Facebook Inc. held its initial public offering and began trading on the NASDAQ. The company was valued at $104 billion making it the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.
2014 - Russian President Putin signed a bill to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federation.
