Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 18

This is a list of selected December 18 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← December 17	December 19 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• 
  Epimetheus
• 
  Atlas rocket carrying the SCORE satellite
• 
  Kublai Khan
• Flooding in Kota Tinggi, Malaysia
  Flooding in Kota Tinggi, Malaysia
• 
  Piltdown Man skull
• 
  The first performance of The Nutcracker
• 
  Larry Wall
• 
  Demonstrators marching through Habib Bourguib Avenue in Tunis
• 
  Various world leaders at the Copenhagen Summit

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Republic Day in Niger (1958);	unreferenced section
1271 – Mongol ruler Kublai Khan established the Yuan dynasty in present-day Mongolia and China.	refimprove section
1854 – The Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada abolished the seigneurial system of New France.	lead too long
1892 – The first performance of the fairy-tale ballet The Nutcracker was held at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia.	refimprove sections
1912 – Amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced the discovery of fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human, known as Piltdown Man, which later turned out to be a hoax.	globalize
1972 – Vietnam War: The United States began Operation Linebacker II against North Vietnam, the largest heavy bomber strikes launched by the U.S. Air Force since the end of World War II.	lots of {{cn}} tags (18)
1979 – Mohammad Mofatteh, an Iranian philosopher, was assassinated by the Furqan Group.	missing information
1987 – Programmer Larry Wall released the first version of the programming language Perl via the comp.sources.misc newsgroup.	far too many CN tags for a good article
1990 – The Migrant Workers Convention was signed at the United Nations enhancing the protection for migrant workers.	refimprove
2005 – The most recent Chadian Civil War began when rebel groups, allegedly backed by neighbouring Sudan, launched an attack on Adré.	refimprove section
2006 – The first of a series of floods struck Southeast Asia, which eventually killed 118 people and left over 400,000 others homeless.	empty section

Eligible

• 1622 – Portuguese forces and their Imbangala allies defeated the Kongo army at the Battle of Mbumbi.
• 1867 – In Angola, New York, the last coach of a Lake Shore Railway train derailed, plunged 40 feet (12 m) down a gully, and caught fire, resulting in approximately 49 deaths.
• 1932 – Playing indoors at Chicago Stadium on a modified American football field, the Chicago Bears defeated the Portsmouth Spartans in the first playoff game of the National Football League.
• 1939 – Second World War: The Luftwaffe won a victory over the Royal Air Force in the Battle of the Heligoland Bight, greatly influencing both sides' future aerial warfare strategy.
• 1958 – The United States launched SCORE, the world's first communications satellite.
• 1963 – Ghanaian and other African students organized a protest in Moscow's Red Square in response to the alleged murder of medical student Edmund Assare-Addo.
• 1966 – Epimetheus, one of the moons of Saturn, was discovered, but was mistaken for Janus; it took twelve years to determine that they are two distinct objects sharing the same orbit.
• 1969 – On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the sixth James Bond film and the only one to star George Lazenby, premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London.
• 2009 – The Copenhagen Summit on climate change ended with the drafting of the non-binding Copenhagen Accord.
• 2010 – The Tunisian Revolution began with what was initially a series of protests, but then evolved into nationwide demonstrations that eventually toppled the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after more than 23 years of rule.
• 2017 – An Amtrak Cascades passenger train derailed near DuPont, Washington, killing three people and injuring sixty-five others.
• Born/died: | Yaonian Yanmujin |d|933| Edith of Wessex |d|1075| Charles Wesley |b|1707| James Watney |b|1800| Jean-Baptiste Lamarck |d|1829| Lionel Monckton |b|1861| Ty Cobb |b|1886| Edwin Howard Armstrong |b|1890| Keith Richards |b|1943| Alexei Kosygin |d|1980| Tara Conner |b|1985

Notes

• Mohamed Bouazizi appears on December 17, so Tunisian revolution should not appear in the same year

December 18: National Day in Qatar (1878)

Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat

• 1499 – Muslims in Granada began a rebellion against their Castilian rulers in response to forced conversions to Catholicism.
• 1898 – Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat (pictured) set the first official land speed record, averaging 63.16 km/h (39.245 mph) over 1 km (0.62 mi) in Achères, France.
• 1913 – The Jew's Christmas, the first American film to include a rabbi as a character, was released.
• 1916 – The French defeated German forces around the city of Verdun-sur-Meuse in northeast France, ending the longest and one of the bloodiest battles in the First World War.
• 1996 – The school board of Oakland, California, passed a controversial resolution officially declaring African-American Vernacular English to be a separate language or dialect.

• Henrietta Edwards (b. 1849)
• Robert Moses (b. 1888)
• Noriko Matsueda (b. 1971)

More anniversaries:

• December 17
• December 18
• December 19