Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/August 18

This is a list of selected August 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.

← August 17	August 19 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• 
  Royal Australian Air Force helicopter
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  Pierre Jules Janssen
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  Helium atom nucleus
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  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
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  Margaret of Valois
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  Phobos
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  The depot ship Pamiat Azova, sunk at Kronstadt
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  Statue of Alice Nutter, hanged during the Pendle witch trials

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Paryushana begins (Svetambar Jains, 2017);	unreferenced section
1572 – French Wars of Religion: Margaret of Valois married Huguenot King Henry of Navarre, in an attempt to reconcile Protestants and Catholics.	Lots of cn
1868 – Astronomer Pierre Jules Janssen discovered helium while analysing the chromosphere of the sun during a total solar eclipse in Guntur, India.	refimprove section
1917 – A fire destroyed about 9,500 homes in Thessaloniki, Greece, leaving 70,000 homeless.	refimprove
1976 – North Korean soldiers killed two American soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone, heightening tensions over a poplar tree that blocked the line of sight between a UN Command checkpoint and an observation post.	refimprove section
1989 – Leading Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was assassinated during a public demonstration in the town of Soacha, Cundinamarca.	lots of CN tags in one section
2008 – War in Afghanistan: French ISAF forces were ambushed by Afghan militants, suffering heavy casualties.	unreferenced section
Agneta Horn |b|1629|	refimprove
Cameron White |b|1983|	Multiple cn tags

Eligible

• Long Tan Day in Australia (1966)
• 684 – Second Fitna: Umayyad partisans defeated the supporters of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr near Damascus, cementing Umayyad control of Syria.
• 1487 – Reconquista: After a four-month siege, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain conquered the city of Málaga from the Emirate of Granada.
• 1590 – John White, governor of the Roanoke Colony, the first English settlement in North America (located in present-day North Carolina), returned after a three-year absence to find it deserted (depicted).
• 1612 – The trials of the Pendle and Samlesbury witches (statue pictured), among the most famous of England's witch trials, began at the assizes in Lancaster.
• 1783 – A meteor procession blazed across the night sky over Great Britain.
• 1864 – American Civil War: At the Battle of Globe Tavern, Union forces attempted to sever the Weldon Railroad during the Siege of Petersburg.
• 1891 – A hurricane struck the Caribbean island of Martinique, killing about 700 people, injuring at least 1,000 others, and causing severe damage.
• 1940 – Second World War: During the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe made an all-out effort to destroy RAF Fighter Command, with both sides combined losing more aircraft on this day than at any other point during the campaign.
• 1945 – World War II: Amid a Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Sakhalin, Japanese police massacred 18 Koreans in Kamishisuka.
• 1948 – Australia won the fifth Test of the 1948 Ashes series, becoming the first Test cricket team to go undefeated in England, earning them the nickname "The Invincibles".
• 1966 – Vietnam War: Members of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment were surrounded by a much larger Viet Cong unit at the Battle of Long Tan, but held them off for several hours until reinforcements arrived.
• 1983 – Hurricane Alicia made landfall near Galveston, Texas, causing $3 billion in damage and 21 fatalities.
• 2008 – Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf resigned under pressure from a movement to impeach him.
• 2017 – Two people were killed and eight others wounded when a rejected asylum seeker went on a knife rampage in Turku, Finland.
• Born/died this day: | Olaf I of Denmark |d|1095| Knut Alvsson |d|1502| Baji Rao I |b|1700| Ruth Norman |b|1900| Maria Ulfah Santoso |b|1911| Robert Redford |b|1936| Edward Norton |b|1969| Evan Gattis |b|1986|

Notes

• Deimos (moon) appears on August 12, so Phobos should not appear in the same year
• 1915 Galveston hurricane appears on August 17, so Hurricane Alicia should not appear in the same year

August 18: Ghost Festival in China (2024)

White's discovery of the abandoned Roanoke Colony

• 1590 – John White, governor of the Roanoke Colony, the first English settlement in North America (located in present-day North Carolina), returned after a three-year absence to find it deserted (depicted).
• 1877 – American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons, six days after discovering Deimos, the smaller one.
• 1919 – Russian Civil War: British motor torpedo boats raided the Bolshevik Baltic Fleet's home base of Kronstadt, sinking a depot ship and damaging a battleship.
• 1920 – The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women's suffrage in the country.
• 1964 – East German Communist Party member Hildegard Trabant was killed while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall.

• Olaf I of Denmark (d. 1095)
• Maria Ulfah Santoso (b. 1911)
• Learned Hand (d. 1961)
• Jack Hobbs (b. 1988)

More anniversaries:

• August 17
• August 18
• August 19