This Day in History

On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing all American women’s right to vote, was ratified as Tennessee became the 36th state to approve it.

On this date:

In 1587, Virginia Dare became the first child of English parents to be born in present-day America, on what is now Roanoke Island in North Carolina. (However, the Roanoke colony ended up mysteriously disappearing.)

In 1894, Congress established the Bureau of Immigration.

In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued his Proclamation of Neutrality, aimed at keeping the United States out of World War I.

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King dedicated the Thousand Islands Bridge connecting the United States and Canada.

In 1954, during the Eisenhower administration, Assistant Secretary of Labor James Ernest Wilkins became the first black official to attend a meeting of the president’s Cabinet as he sat in for Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell.

In 1963, James Meredith became the first black student to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

In 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York, wound to a close after three nights with a mid-morning set by Jimi Hendrix.

In 1976, two U.S. Army officers were killed in Korea’s demilitarized zone as a group of North Korean soldiers wielding axes and metal pikes attacked U.S. and South Korean soldiers.

In 1983, Hurricane Alicia slammed into the Texas coast, leaving 21 dead and causing more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage.

In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush accepted the presidential nomination of the Republican National Convention in New Orleans.

In 1993, a judge in Sarasota, Fla., ruled that Kimberly Mays, the 14-year-old girl who had been switched at birth with another baby, need never again see her biological parents, Ernest and Regina Twigg, in accordance with her stated wishes. (However, Kimberly later moved in with the Twiggs.)