TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Wednesday, May 18, the 138th day of 2022. There are 227 days left in the year. On this date in:

1652: Rhode Island became the first American colony to pass a law abolishing African slavery; however, the law was apparently never enforced.

1863: The Siege of Vicksburg began during the Civil War, ending July 4 with a Union victory.

1896: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, endorsed “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept renounced 58 years later by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

1910: Halley’s Comet passed by earth,

brushing it with its tail.

1927: In America’s deadliest school attack, part of a schoolhouse in Bath Township, Michigan, was blown up with explosives planted by local farmer Andrew Kehoe, who then set off a bomb in his truck; the attacks killed 38 children and six adults, including Kehoe, who’d earlier killed his wife. (Authorities said Kehoe, who suffered financial difficulties, was seeking revenge for losing a township clerk election.)

1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority.

1934: Congress approved, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the socalled “Lindbergh Act,” providing for the death penalty in cases of interstate kidnapping.

1973: Harvard law professor Archibald Cox was appointed Watergate special prosecutor by U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

1980: The Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state exploded, leaving 57 people dead or missing.

1981: The New York Native, a gay newspaper, carried a story concerning rumors of “an exotic new disease” among homosexuals; it was the first published report about what came to be known as AIDS.