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ON DEC. 18 ...
In 1737 violin-maker Antonio Stradivari died in Cremona, Italy.
In 1865 the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, was declared in effect.
In 1886 baseball Hall of Famer Ty Cobb was born in Narrows, Ga.
In 1892 Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” publicly premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In 1940 Adolf Hitler signed a secret directive ordering preparations for a Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941.
In 1944, in a pair of rulings, the Supreme Court upheld the wartime relocation of Japanese-Americans but also said undeniably loyal Americans of Japanese ancestry could not be detained.
In 1956 Japan was admitted to the United Nations.
In 1957 the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first civilian nuclear facility to generate electricity in the United
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States, went online.
In 1969 Britain’s Parliament abolished the death penalty for murder.
In 1971 Jesse Jackson announced in Chicago the founding of Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity).
In 1972 the United States began its heaviest bombing of North Vietnam. (The bombardment ended 12 days later.)
In 1987 Ivan Boesky was sentenced to three years in prison for plotting Wall Street’s biggest insider-trading scandal to date.
In 1994 former President Jimmy Carter arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina on a private mission to seek an end to 32 months of war.
In 1997 comic actor Chris Farley was found dead of a drug overdoese in his Chicago apartment; he was 33.
In 1998 the House began debate on four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton.
In 1999, in St. Martinville, La., Cuban inmates who had held a jail warden and six others hostage for almost a week surrendered. Also in 1999 French film director Robert Bresson died in Paris; he was 98.
In 2000 the Electoral College cast its ballots, with President-elect George W. Bush receiving the expected 271; Al Gore, however, received 266, one fewer than expected, because of a District of Columbia Democrat who left her ballot blank to protest the district’s lack of representation in Congress. Also in 2000 antitrust regulators approved the merger of British drug companies
Glaxo Wellcome PLC and SmithKline Beecham PLC.
In 2003 two federal appeals courts ruled the U.S. military could not indefinitely hold prisoners without access to lawyers or American courts. Also in 2003 a jury in Chesapeake, Va., convicted teenager Lee Boyd Malvo of capital murder in the Washington-area sniper case. Also in 2003 a judge in Seattle sentenced confessed Green River Killer Gary Ridgway to 48 consecutive life terms.
In 2004 the former Iraqi general known as “Chemical Ali,” Ali Hassan al-Majid, went before a judge in the first investigative hearings of former members of his regime.
In 2011 Vaclav Havel, who led the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and became the country’s president in 1989, died in Hradecek in northern Czech Republic; he was 75.
In 2012 an independent panel faulted the State Department for “grossly inadequate” security in the attack at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Also in 2012 bank robbers Joseph Banks and Kenneth Conley used bedsheets to rappel 15 stories of a high-rise federal jail in Chicago in a daring jailbreak. (They were both later captured.) Also in 2012 Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel became the first freshman to be voted The Associated Press Player of the Year in college football.
In 2017 an Amtrak train making the first-ever run along a faster new route hurtled off an overpass near Tacoma, Wash., and spilled some of its cars onto the highway below, killing at least six people.