The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
TODAY IN HISTORY
WEDNESDAY MAY 18, 2022
1980
The Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state exploded, leaving 57 people dead or missing.
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.
1933
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority.
1934
Congress approved, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the so-called “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.
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.
1998
The U.S. government filed an antitrust case against Microsoft, saying the powerful software company had a “choke hold” on competitors that was denying consumers important choices about how they bought and used computers.