November 18 in History

Frederick II was the monarch of Prussia from 1740 until his death in 1786. He was the last Hohenzollern monarch titled King in Prussia, declaring himself King of Prussia after annexing Royal Prussia from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772. His most significant accomplishments include military successes in the Silesian wars, reorganisation of the Prussian Army, the First Partition of Poland, and patronage of the arts and the Enlightenment. Prussia greatly increased its territories and became a major military power in Europe under his rule. He became known as Frederick the Great and was nicknamed "Old Fritz".

The Battle of Vertières was the last major battle of the Saint-Domingue expedition and the final phase of the Haitian Revolution. It was fought on 18 November 1803 between the rebel Indigenous Army under Jean Jacques Dessalines and François Capois and French forces under Donatien de Rochambeau, who were committed to regaining control of the island.

The Battle of Krasnoi unfolded from 15 to 18 November 1812 marking a critical episode in Napoleon's arduous retreat from Moscow. Over the course of six skirmishes the Russian forces under Field Marshal Kutuzov inflicted significant blows from a prepared ambush upon the remnants of the Grande Armée, already severely weakened by attrition warfare. These confrontations, though not escalated into full-scale battles, led to substantial losses for the French due to their depleted weapons and horses.

The 1867 Virgin Islands earthquake and tsunami occurred on November 18, at 14.45 in the Anegada Passage about 20 km southwest of Saint Thomas, Danish West Indies. The Ms 7.5 earthquake came just 20 days after the devastating San Narciso Hurricane in the same region. Tsunamis from this earthquake were some of the highest ever recorded in the Lesser Antilles. Wave heights exceeded 10 m (33 ft) in some islands in the Lesser Antilles. The earthquake and tsunami resulted in no more than 50 fatalities, although hundreds of casualties were reported.

A time zone is an area which observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries between countries and their subdivisions instead of strictly following longitude, because it is convenient for areas in frequent communication to keep the same time.

The Hay–Pauncefote Treaty is a treaty signed by the United States and Great Britain on 18 November 1901, as a legal preliminary to the U.S. building of the Panama Canal. It nullified the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty of 1850 and gave the United States the right to create and control a canal across the Central American isthmus to connect the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. In the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty, both nations had renounced building such a canal under the sole control of one nation.

Haakon VII was King of Norway from 1905 until his death in 1957, having reigned for nearly 52 years.

A suffragette was a member or supporter of the British Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an activist women's group agitating for votes for women, which in the early 20th century broke away from the much larger, peaceful and longer lasting National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), whose supporters were known as suffragists. Both organisations campaigned for the right to vote in public elections in the United Kingdom. However, the Women's Social and Political Union, a women-only movement founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, engaged in direct action and civil disobedience as a result of what they saw as slow progress towards universal suffrage. In 1906, a journalist writing in the Daily Mail coined the term suffragette for the WSPU, derived from suffragistα, reportedly to 'indicate that special revolutionary quality of impatience which marked the new variety of suffragist', although Elizabeth Crawford, a researcher and author on the women's suffrage movement, has suggested it was to 'belittle and to show that they were less than the proper kind of suffrage worker'. Whatever the truth was, the militants embraced the new name, even adopting it for use as the title of the newspaper published by the WSPU.

Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of northern Europe. It is one of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. It borders Russia to the east and Belarus to the southeast and shares a maritime border with Sweden to the west. Latvia covers an area of 64,573 km2 (24,932 sq mi), with a population of 1.83 million. The country has a temperate seasonal climate. Its capital and largest city is Riga. Latvians, who are the titular nation and comprise 65.5% of the country's population, belong to the ethnolinguistic group of the Balts and speak Latvian. Russians are the most prominent minority in the country, at almost a quarter of the population; 37.7% of the population speak Russian as their native tongue.

The 1929 Grand Banks earthquake occurred on November 18, 1929. The shock had a moment magnitude of 7.2 and a maximum Rossi–Forel intensity of VI and was centered in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of Newfoundland in the Laurentian Slope seismic zone.

The Battle of Berlin was a bombing campaign against Berlin by RAF Bomber Command, along with raids on other German cities to keep German defences dispersed. The attacks were a part of the bombing of Berlin during the strategic bombing of Germany in the Second World War. Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) Bomber Command, believed that "we can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF come in with us. It will cost us between 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war".

On Tuesday, 18 November 1947, a fire engulfed the Ballantynes department store in central Christchurch, New Zealand, resulting in the death of 41 people. It remains the deadliest fire in New Zealand's history.

The Vietnam War was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and their allies. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations. The conflict was the second of the Indochina wars and a proxy war of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and US. The Vietnam War was one of the postcolonial wars of national liberation, a theater in the Cold War, and a civil war, with civil warfare a defining feature from the outset. Direct US military involvement escalated from 1965 until US forces were withdrawn in 1973. The fighting spilled into the Laotian and Cambodian civil wars, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975.

Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he represented California in both houses of the United States Congress before serving as the 36th vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961. His presidency saw the reduction of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, détente with the Soviet Union and China, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon's second term ended early when he became the only U.S. president to resign from office, as a result of the Watergate scandal.

The McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet is an all-weather supersonic, twin-engined, carrier-capable, multirole combat aircraft, designed as both a fighter and ground attack aircraft. Designed by McDonnell Douglas and Northrop, the F/A-18 was derived from the YF-17 that lost against the YF-16 in the United States Air Force's lightweight fighter program. The United States Navy selected the YF-17 for the Navy Air Combat Fighter program, further developed the design and renamed it F/A-18; the United States Marine Corps would also adopt the aircraft. The Hornet is also used by the air forces of several other nations, and formerly by the U.S. Navy's Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels.

Aeroflot Flight 6833, en route from Tbilisi, Georgian SSR, to Leningrad, Russian SFSR, with an intermediate stop in Batumi, was the scene of an attempted aircraft hijacking by seven young Georgians on 18–19 November 1983. The crisis ended with a storming of the Tu-134A airliner by Alpha Group that resulted in eight dead. The surviving hijackers were subsequently tried and executed.

The King's Cross fire occurred in 1987 at King's Cross St Pancras tube station in London, England, causing 31 fatalities. It began under a wooden escalator before spreading into the ticket hall in a flashover.

The Battle of Vukovar was an 87-day siege of Vukovar in eastern Croatia by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), supported by various paramilitary forces from Serbia, between August and November 1991. Before the Croatian War of Independence the Baroque town was a prosperous, mixed community of Croats, Serbs and other ethnic groups. As Yugoslavia began to break up, Serbia's President Slobodan Milošević and Croatia's President Franjo Tuđman began pursuing nationalist politics. In 1990, an armed insurrection was started by Croatian Serb militias, supported by the Serbian government and paramilitary groups, who seized control of Serb-populated areas of Croatia. The JNA began to intervene in favour of the rebellion, and conflict broke out in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia in May 1991. In August, the JNA launched a full-scale attack against Croatian-held territory in eastern Slavonia, including Vukovar.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, referred to colloquially in the Anglosphere as NAFTA, was an agreement signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States that created a trilateral trade bloc in North America. The agreement came into force on January 1, 1994, and superseded the 1988 Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Canada. The NAFTA trade bloc formed one of the largest trade blocs in the world by gross domestic product.

The Channel Tunnel fire of 18 November 1996 occurred on a train carrying Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) and their drivers through the Channel Tunnel from France to the United Kingdom. The fire was seen on the train as it entered the tunnel and, in line with the policy at the time, an attempt was made to drive to the UK where the fire would be dealt with. However, after an indication of a serious problem with the train, the driver stopped at 21:58 CET, 19 kilometres (12 mi) into the tunnel. The locomotive and passenger coach were rapidly enveloped in thick smoke, and the locomotive lost power. Reconfiguration of the tunnel ventilation systems was delayed, but by 22:30 all passengers and crew were safe, in the service tunnel, with minor injuries.

In the Iraq disarmament crisis of the early 2000s, Iraq, led by president Saddam Hussein, was pressured by the United States and its other adversaries to destroy alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—biological, chemical, and nuclear. In the 1980s, Iraq had programs to produce all three, but in the 1990s, the programs were ended, and the WMD were destroyed. The U.S.' rationale for its 2003 invasion of Iraq was that the country still had WMD, and would use them.

Pope Tawadros II is the 118th and current Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St. Mark, succeeding the late Pope Shenouda III as leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. He took office on 18 November 2012, two weeks after being selected.