On July 18, A.D. 64, the Great Fire of Rome began.
In 1610 the painter Caravaggio (born Michelangelo Merisi) died in what is now Italy’s Tuscany region; he was in his late 30s.
In 1792 American naval hero John Paul Jones died at 45 in Paris.
In 1811 British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (“Vanity Fair”) was born in Calcutta.
In 1817 novelist Jane Austen died at 41 in England.
In 1872 Britain introduced the concept of voting by secret ballot. Also, Mexican president and revolutionary Benito Juarez died at 66 in Mexico City.
In 1913 comedian Red Skelton was born Richard Bernard Skelton in Vincennes, Ind.
In 1918 Nelson Mandela, the South African nationalist who ascended to his nation’s presidency after the end of apartheid, was born in Umtata.
In 1929 blues singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was born in Cleveland.
In 1932 the U.S. and Canada signed a treaty to develop the St. Lawrence Seaway.
In 1936 the Spanish Civil War began.
In 1940 the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated President Franklin Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term in office.
In 1944 Hideki Tojo stepped down as Japan’s premier and war minister after military setbacks in World War II.
In 1947 President Harry Truman signed the Presidential Succession Act, which placed the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore next in the line of succession after the vice president.
In 1969 a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard; passenger Mary Jo Kopechne died.
In 1984 a gunman killed 21 people at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif., before being shot dead by police.
In 1988 Texas Treasurer Ann Richards delivered the keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Atlanta, needling likely Republican nominee George H.W. Bush as having been “born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
In 1989 actress Rebecca Schaeffer, 21, was shot to death at her Los Angeles home by obsessed fan Robert Bardo, who later was sentenced to life in prison.
In 1990 Dr. Karl Menninger, the dominant figure in American psychiatry for six decades, died at 96 in Topeka, Kan.
In 1994 a car bomb destroyed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 95 people. Also, Tutsi rebels declared an end to Rwanda’s 14-week-old civil war.
In 2000 Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.) died at 61 in Atlanta.
In 2004 former EPA chief Anne Gorsuch Burford died at 62 in Aurora, Colo.
In 2005 Eric Rudolph was sentenced in Birmingham, Ala., to life in prison for an abortion clinic bombing that killed an off-duty police officer and maimed a nurse.
