December 18th

Second Punic War: Battle of the Trebia - Hannibal's Carthaginian army heavily defeat Roman forces on Italian soil.

The Senate votes 65 to 31 in favor of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Clinton-era military policy that forbids openly gay men and women from serving in the military.

Reality TV stars Jon and Kate Gosselin, parents of eight children, divorced.

A U.N. court in Tanzania convicted former Rwandan army Col. Theoneste Bagosora of genocide and crimes against humanity for masterminding the killings of more than half a million people in a 100-day slaughter in 1994.

A jury in Chesapeake, Va., convicted teenager Lee Boyd Malvo of two counts of murder in the Washington-area sniper shootings. (He was later sentenced to life in prison without parole.).

George W. Bush received 271 votes in the delayed Electoral College balloting.

Ivan F. Boesky was sentenced to three years in prison for plotting Wall Street's biggest insider-trading scandal.

The United States began the heaviest bombing of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The British Parliament abolished the death penalty for murder.

Saturn's Moon, Epimetheus, discovered. One of Saturn's 150 natural satellites or moons, Epimetheus shares its orbit with another moon, Janus. Saturn's largest moon is Titan, which is the only natural satellite in the Solar System with an atmosphere.

The world's first communications satellite was launched by the United States aboard an Atlas rocket.

The Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania became the first civilian nuclear facility to generate electricity in the United States.

Japan was admitted to the United Nations.

The Supreme Court upheld the wartime relocation of Japanese-Americans.

President Woodrow Wilson, widowed the year before, married Edith Bolling Galt.

Piltdown Man Hoax. The announcement by British archeologist Charles Dawson at a conference of the Geological Society of London was received with very little skepticism in the field of paleoanthropology. The discovery of fossilized remains of an unidentified human ancestor in Piltdown, East Sussex, England, was thought to have provided valuable clues about human evolution. It wasn't until 1953 that the Piltdown Man was discovered to be a hoax - with the skull consisting of the jawbones of an orangutan and the cranium of an adult human being.

Tchaikovsky's 'The Nutcracker Suite' premiered at St. Petersburg's Maryinksy Theatre.

Baseball Hall of Famer Ty Cobb was born in Narrows, Ga.

Slavery was abolished with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

New Jersey became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

Violin maker Antonio Stradivari died in Cremona, Italy.

First fleet of the Dutch East India Compnay under Admiral Steven van der Haghen departs for the East-Indies.

Kublai Khan renames his empire 'Yuan' (元 yuán), marking the start of the Yuan Dynasty of China.