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18 February| 18 February 1229 | Holy Roman Empire, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Egypt [Crusades (1095–1272)] | The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II negotiates the return of Jerusalem to Christian control with al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt; the Sixth Crusade thus ends without any fighting. | | 18 February 1516 | England [births and deaths] | Mary I (‘Bloody Mary’), first reigning queen of England 1553–58, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, wife of Philip II of Spain, born in Greenwich, near London, England (–1558). | | 18 February 1546 | Holy Roman Empire, Saxony [political events] | Martin Luther, great German theologian, preacher, biblical translator, and instigator of the Protestant Reformation, dies in Eisleben, Saxony (now Germany), while trying to negotiate between the landgraves of Mansfeld, as Germany rushes towards religious war (62). | | 18 February 1564 | Rome [births and deaths] | Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni), Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, and architect, also poet, whose best-known works include the fresco The Last Judgement (1534–41) and the sculptures Pietà (c. 1500) and David (1504), dies in Rome, Italy (89). | | 18 February 1865 | USA, Confederate States of America [American Civil War (1861–65)] | The Confederate port of Charleston, South Carolina, besieged by the US Navy since 1861, surrenders. | | 18 February 1874 | UK [administration] | The Conservative politician Benjamin Disraeli becomes British prime minister, with Stafford Northcote as chancellor of the Exchequer, Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby, as foreign secretary, and Richard Cross as home secretary. | | 18 February 1899 | France [elections] | Emile Loubet is elected president of France following the death of Félix Faure. | | 18 February 1913 | Mexico [revolution] | The commander of the Mexican army, Victoriano Huerta, joins the rebel Mexican soldiers and forces President Francisco Madero to resign. He subsequently declares himself president, and civil war ensues. | | 18 February 1916 | Cameroon [World War I (1914–18)] | The last German garrison in the Cameroons surrenders to the British general Sir Charles Dobell. | | 18 February 1930 | [astronomy] | US astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, at the Lowell Observatory, Arizona, discovers the ninth planet, Pluto. | | 18 February 1950 | USA [telephone services] | In the USA, telephone direct-dialing becomes possible between New York and New Jersey. | | 18 February 1965 | Gambia [decolonization] | Gambia becomes independent within the British Commonwealth. | | 18 February 1967 | USA [births and deaths] | J Robert Oppenheimer, US theoretical physicist and director of the Los Alamos laboratory which built the first atomic bomb, dies in Princeton, New Jersey (62). |
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