TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Sunday, Dec. 18, the 352nd day of 2022. There are 13 days left in the year. On this date in:

1865: The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, was declared in effect by Secretary of State William H. Seward.

1892: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker” publicly premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia; although now considered a classic, it received a generally negative reception from critics.

1917: Congress passed the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” and sent it to the states for ratification.

1940: Adolf Hitler signed a secret directive ordering preparations for a Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. (Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941.)

1944: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the government’s wartime evacuation of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast while at the same time ruling that “concededly loyal” Americans of Japanese ancestry could not continue to be detained.

1957: The Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first nuclear facility to generate electricity in the United States, went on line.

1958: The world’s first communications satellite, SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment), nicknamed “Chatterbox,” was launched by the United States aboard an Atlas rocket.

1969: Britain’s House of Lords joined the House of Commons in making permanent a 1965 ban on the death penalty for murder.

1992: Kim Young-sam was elected South Korea’s first civilian president in three decades.

2003: Two federal appeals courts ruled the U.S. military could not indefinitely hold prisoners without access to lawyers or American courts.

2011: The last convoy of heavily armored U.S. troops left Iraq, crossing into Kuwait in darkness in the final moments of a nine-year war.

2019: The U.S. House impeached President Donald Trump on two charges, sending his case to the Senate for trial; the articles of impeachment accused him of abusing the power of the presidency to investigate rival Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election and then obstructing Congress’ investigation. (It was the first of two Trump impeachment trials that would end in acquittal by the Senate.)