Did You Know This Happened Today in History? #3 May 18th

526 St. John I ends his reign as Catholic Pope.
1291 Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil and his forces take the last Christian stronghold of Acre.
1302 The weaver Peter de Coningk led a massacre of the Flemish oligarchs.
1642 Montreal, Canada, was founded.
1643 Queen Anne, the widow of Louis XIII, is granted sole and absolute power as regent by the Paris parliament, overriding the late king's will.
1652 A law is passed in Rhode Island banning slavery in the colonies but it causes little stir and seems unlikely to be enforced.
1792 Russian troops invade Poland.
1798 The first Secretary of the U.S. Navy was appointed. He was Benjamin Stoddert.
1802 Britain declares war on France.
1804 Napoleon Bonaparte becomes the Emperor of France.
1828 Battle of Las Piedras ended the conflict between Uruguay and Brazil.
1860 Abraham Lincoln is nominated for president.
1864 The fighting at Spotsylvania in Virginia, reaches its peak at the Bloody Angle.
1896 The U.S. Supreme court upheld the "separate but equal" policy in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. The ruling was overturned 58 years later with Brown vs. Board of Education.
1896 Khodynka Tragedy: A mass panic on Khodynka Field, Moscow, during the festivities of the coronation of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, results in the deaths of 1,389 people
1904 Brigand Raisuli kidnaps American Ion H. Perdicaris in Morocco.
1917 The U.S. Congress passes the Selective Service act, calling up soldiers to fight World War I.
1931 Japanese pilot Seiji Yoshihara crashes his plane in the Pacific Ocean while trying to be the first to cross the ocean nonstop. He is picked up seven hours later by a passing ship.
1933 President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Tennessee Valley Authority Act.
1934 The U.S. Congress approved an act, known as the "Lindberg Act," that called for the death penalty in interstate kidnapping cases.
1942 New York ends night baseball games for the rest of World War II.
1944 The Allies finally capture Monte Cassino in Italy.
1949 Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America was incorporated.
1951 The United Nations moves its headquarters to New York city.
1953 The first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound, Jacqueline Cochran, piloted an F-86 Sabrejet over California at an average speed of 652.337 miles-per-hour.
1969 Two battalions of the 101st Airborne Division assault Hill 937 but cannot reach the top because of muddy conditions.
1974 India becomes the sixth nation to explode an atomic bomb.
1978 Star Wars opened for the first time in Singapore.
1980 After rumbling for two months, Mount Saint Helens, in Washington, erupts 3 times in 24 hours.
1983 The U.S. Senate revised immigration laws and gave millions of illegal aliens legal status under an amnesty program.
1994 Israel's three decades of occupation in the Gaza Strip ended as Israeli troops completed their withdrawal and Palestinian authorities took over.
1998 The U.S. federal government and 20 states filed a sweeping antitrust case against Microsoft Corp., saying the computer software company had a "choke hold" on competitors which denied consumer choices by controlling 90% of the software market.
2009 Sri Lankan Civil War: The LTTE are defeated by the Sri Lankan government, ending almost 26 years of fighting between the two sides.
2012 Facebook Inc. held its initial public offering and began trading on the NASDAQ. The company was valued at $104 billion making it the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.
2014 Russian President Putin signed a bill to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federation.