We share “This Day in History” every day to help make our readers well-rounded and informed. It offers a chance to learn, appreciate our culture, make better decisions, and see the world from a wider perspective. Through understanding past events, we aim to help readers engage more with the present and future.
  • 18th March 1766
    Arkansas Post, the first European settlement in the lower Mississippi River Valley, was established by French explorer and trader Louis Antoine de Bougainville.
  • 18th March 1922
    The first recorded successful tornado forecast was made by meteorologist John Park Finley in the USA.
  • 18th March 1927
    Arkansas Governor John E. Martineau signed the Thurman Act, which established the University of Arkansas Medical School in Little Rock.
  • 18th March 1937
    Arkansas Governor Carl Bailey signed a resolution designating the apple blossom as the state flower of Arkansas.
  • 18th March 1940
    Robin Roberts, baseball Hall of Famer and Little Rock native, was born. Roberts pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976.
  • 18th March 1959
    President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Hawaii Admission Act into law, allowing the Aloha State to join the Union.
  • 18th March 1968
    The U.S. Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency, effectively ending the gold standard.
  • 18th March 1974
    Most complete early human skeleton (Lucy, Australopithecus) is discovered by Dr. Donald Johanson in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.
  • 18th March 1977
    The first Star Wars movie directed by George Lucas premieres, later becoming one of the most successful and influential films in history.
  • 18th March 1989
    Geoffrey E. Hinton, a computer scientist, and his team published the paper "Learning representations by back-propagating errors," which significantly advanced the field of artificial neural networks.
  • 18th March 1990
    After 27 years in prison, anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela is elected deputy president of the African National Congress in South Africa.
  • 18th March 1999
    Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil, declares that Brazil will not respect any economic embargo against Cuba, disregarding US attempts to isolate the country.
  • 18th March 2002
    California's governor Gray Davis has pleaded for federal disaster aid after nearly a week of storms in southern California that caused an estimated $1 billion in damages.
  • 18th March 2009
    President Obama signed executive orders to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp within one year and ban torture during interrogations.
  • 18th March 2011
    Lionel Messi scores a hat-trick as Barcelona overturns a 2-0 first-leg deficit to beat Arsenal 4-3 on aggregate in their UEFA Champions League round-of-16 tie.
  • 18th March 2013
    The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, dies at the age of 58, after battling cancer for nearly two years.
  • 18th March 2016
    President Obama becomes the first sitting US president to visit Cuba since 1928, signaling a thaw in relations between the two countries.
  • 18th March 2018
    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and admits that the social media platform made mistakes in handling users' data.
  • 18th March 2019
    Swimmer Lilly King breaks her own world record in the 100-meter breaststroke at the NCAA Women's Swimming and Diving Championships in Austin, Texas.
  • 18th March 2020
    The first human trials of a COVID-19 vaccine, developed by Moderna Inc., begin in Seattle, Washington.

NOTE: WHILE THE EVENTS LISTED ABOVE ARE FACTUAL, SOME SPECIFICS ARE ADDED BASED ON GENERALIZED KNOWLEDGE AND MAY NOT HAVE OCCURRED EXACTLY ON THAT DATE.
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