Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/May 18

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 * 1388 – At the Battle of Buir Lake, a Ming Chinese army led by general Lan Yu defeated the forces of Tögüs Temür, the Mongol khan of Northern Yuan.
 * 1863 – American Civil War: General Ulysses S. Grant led his Army of the Tennessee across the Big Black River in preparation for the Siege of Vicksburg.
 * 1896 – Ruling in the landmark decision Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of racial segregation in public transportation under the "separate but equal" doctrine.
 * 1926 – Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was reportedly kidnapped near Venice Beach in Los Angeles before reappearing five weeks later in Mexico.
 * 1933 – U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an act establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority to stimulate the economic development of the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly impacted by the Great Depression.
 * 1936 – In a crime that captivated Japan, Sada Abe (pictured) strangled her lover, cut off his genitals, and carried them around with her for several days until her arrest.
 * 1944 – The Soviet Union forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars to the Uzbek SSR and elsewhere in the country.
 * 1952 – First Indochina War: Viet Minh forces overran a French and Laotian garrison at Muong Khoua, leaving only four survivors.
 * 1955 – Operation Passage to Freedom, the evacuation of 310,000 Vietnamese civilians, soldiers and non-Vietnamese members of the French Army from communist North Vietnam to South Vietnam following the end of the First Indochina War, ended.
 * 1965 – Eli Cohen, a spy who is credited with gathering significant intelligence used by Israel during the Six-Day War, was publicly hanged in Syria.
 * 1974 – India conducted its first nuclear test explosion at Pokhran, the first confirmed nuclear test by a nation outside the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
 * 1996 – Ireland won the Eurovision song contest for the seventh time, the highest number of wins for any country before Sweden tied it in 2023.
 * 2005 – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion publicly debuted at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
 * 2006 – The Parliament of Nepal unanimously voted to strip King Gyanendra of many of his powers.
 * Born/died this day: | Omar Khayyam |b|1048| Guido Luca Ferrero |b|1537| John George Children |b|1777| Elijah Craig |d|1808| William Hood Simpson |b|1888| Hedley Verity |b|1905| Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran |d|1922| Frank Hsieh |b|1946| Mary McLeod Bethune |d|1955| Ian Curtis |d|1980|