Years Ago

Today is Saturday, June 18, the 169th day of 2011. There are 196 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1778: American forces enter Philadelphia as the British withdraw during the Revolutionary War.

1812: The United States declares war against Britain.

1815: Napoleon Bonaparte meets his Waterloo as British and Prussian troops defeat the French in Belgium.

1873: Suffragist Susan B. Anthony is found guilty by a judge in Canandaigua, N.Y., of breaking the law by casting a vote in the 1872 presidential election. (The judge fines Anthony $100, but she never paid the penalty.)

1908: William Howard Taft is nominated for president by the Republican National Convention in Chicago.

1940: During World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill urges his countrymen to conduct themselves in a manner that would prompt future generations to say, “This was their finest hour.”

Charles de Gaulle delivers a speech on the BBC in which he rallies his countrymen after the fall of France to Nazi Germany.

1945: William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” is charged in London with high treason for his English-language wartime broadcasts on German radio. (He is hanged the following January.)

1971: Southwest Airlines begins operations, with flights between Dallas and San Antonio, and Dallas and Houston.

1979: President Jimmy Carter and Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev sign the SALT II strategic arms limitation treaty in Vienna.

1983: Astronaut Sally K. Ride becomes America’s first woman in space as she and four colleagues blast off aboard the space shuttle Challenger.

VINDICATOR FILES

1986: Roger DeCarbo, chairman of the Lawrence County commissioners, says a personnel study will make recommendations on the jobs and salaries of the county’s 190 employees.

By an 80-18 vote, the U.S. Senate adopts an amendment introduced by Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio to make foreign investors pay taxes on capital gains in real estate transactions.

1971: Speaking in Youngstown, John A. Hansan, state welfare director, says the cuts made to the proposed welfare budget by the House of Representatives are “irresponsible” and would prevent the department from acting as a shield between the public and human misery.

Robert Szentirmay, a Youngstown State University senior due to graduate with highest honors, is in guarded condition in South Side Hospital after he attempted to prevent a robbery at his Midland Avenue home.

A squadron of 26 Youngstown police narcotics officers conducts a dawn sweep against illegal drugs, arresting five people, including Dr. William E. Maine, former Youngstown police physician.

1961: A cheering group of city officials and area students greets the Youngstown delegation to Boys State in Central Square. Dennis Gillespie, a 16-year-old Ursuline High student, served as governor and was one of two Ohio boys selected to represent the state at Boys Nation in Washington, D.C.

Samuel Murry of Warren and Russel Cox of Alliance are among four men killed in the crash of a single-engine plane near Lewistown, Pa.

Atty. Paul Fleming refuses a request by Mayor Frank R. Franko that Fleming resign from the Civil Service Commission, bringing into the open a feud that has been percolating in private.

1936: An 80-foot portion of the 150-foot span used by East High students to cross a gully near the school collapses during a storm that saw winds of 50 mph sweep through the area. Many wires and hundreds of tree limbs fell during the storm.

Writing from New York, Vindicator Sports Editor Frank B. Ward says almost everyone picks Joe Louis to dispatch Max Schmeling when they meet at Yankee Stadium in a boxing match expected to draw 70,000 paying fans.

Reillly & Quinn, excavating and railroad contractors at 144 Wood St. in Youngstown, win a huge contract from the Arundel Corp. of Baltimore, Md., to move 24 miles of Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad track for a water conservation project in the Muskingum Valley.