Today in History: August 18

1227: Genghis Khan dies while campaigning in Szechuan.  His burial party slaughters everyone they run across so that no one will be able to tell where he’s buried.

1587: Virginia Dare becomes the first English child to be born in America.

1809: Pioneer British industrialist Matthew Boulton, whose firm of Boulton & Watt made the steam engine a commercial success, dies at Birmingham, Warwickshire.

1909: The city of Tokyo presents the United States with 2,000 cherry trees.  President Taft decides to have them planted down by the Potomac River.

1920: Women get the vote in the United States when Tennessee becomes the 36th state to ratify the 19th amendment to the Constitution.

1940: Walter Percy Chrysler dies at Kings Point, New York.  He built his Chrysler Corp. out of the pieces of the financially crippled Maxwell Motor Co., in which he acquired a controlling interest in 1921.

1958: G.P. Putnam’s Sons publishes the first U.S. edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.  The reaction proves there’s no such thing as bad publicity for a book.

1992: Wang Laboratories, the early computer titan that at one point had $3 billion in sales and 30,000 employees, files for bankruptcy.  Its $60 million headquarters towers are sold for $525,000.