Today is Wednesday, Aug. 18, the 230th day of 2021.
There are 135 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On August 18, 1894, Congress established the Bureau of Immigration.
On this date:
In 1587, Virginia Dare became the first child of English parents to be born in present-day America, on what is now Roanoke Island in North Carolina. (However, the Roanoke colony ended up mysteriously disappearing.)
In 1846, during the Mexican-American War, U.S. forces led by Gen. Stephen W. Kearny occupied Santa Fe in present-day New Mexico.
In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing American women’s right to vote, was ratified as Tennessee became the 36th state to approve it.
In 1954, during the Eisenhower administration, Assistant Secretary of Labor James Ernest Wilkins became the first Black official to attend a meeting of the president’s Cabinet as he sat in for Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell.
In 1958, the novel “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov was first published in New York by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, almost three years after it was originally published in Paris.
In 1963, James Meredith became the first Black student to graduate from the University of Mississippi.
In 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York, wound to a close after three nights with a mid-morning set by Jimi Hendrix.
In 1983, Hurricane Alicia slammed into the Texas coast, leaving 21 dead and causing more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage.
In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush accepted the presidential nomination of the Republican National Convention in New Orleans.
In 1993, a judge in Sarasota, Fla., ruled that Kimberly Mays, the 14-year-old girl who had been switched at birth with another baby, need never again see her biological parents, Ernest and Regina Twigg, in accordance with her stated wishes. (However, Kimberly later moved in with the Twiggs.)
In 2014, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon ordered the National Guard to Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis convulsed by protests over the fatal shooting of a Black teen. Don Pardo, 96, a durable radio and television announcer known for his introductions with a booming baritone on “Saturday Night Live” and other shows, died in Tucson, Arizona.
In 2017, Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s top White House strategist, was forced out of his post by Trump. (Bannon would step down as Breitbart News chairman in January 2018 after the release of a book in which he criticized Trump and members of his family; he was pardoned by Trump in the final hours of Trump’s term after being charged with diverting money from donors who believed the money would be used to build a wall along the southern border.)
