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Today (August 18)

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August 18

One of Kes's costumes with wig and ear prosthetics

Kes is a fictional character in the science fiction television show Star Trek: Voyager, played by Jennifer Lien. Kes joins the crew of the starship USS Voyager in the pilot episode, opening an aeroponics garden and working as a medical assistant. She is a member of a telepathic alien species with a life span of only nine years. She leaves the ship in the fourth season after her powers threaten to destroy it. She reappears in an episode in the sixth season and features in Star Trek: Voyager novels and short stories. Voyager's creators intended Kes to provide audiences with a different perspective on time. Although Kes is portrayed as fragile and innocent, she is also shown as having hidden strength and maturity. Voyager's producers reluctantly fired Lien after her personal issues affected her reliability on set. Kes was a fan favorite character while Voyager was airing, although critics reacted more negatively, finding her boring and without a clear purpose. Lien was praised for her performance. (Full article...)

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On this day

August 18: Ghost Festival in China (2024)

Blackwater Fire

684 – Second Fitna: Umayyad partisans defeated the supporters of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr near Damascus, cementing Umayyad control of Syria.
1823 – At least 9,000 enslaved people rebelled in the British colony in Demerara-Essequibo (in present-day Guyana), demanding emancipation.
1864 – American Civil War: At the Battle of Globe Tavern, Union forces attempted to sever the Weldon Railroad during the siege of Petersburg.
1937 – A lightning strike started the Blackwater Fire (pictured) in Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming, consuming 1,700 acres (7 km²) of old-growth forest and killing 15 firefighters.
2017 – Two people were fatally stabbed and eight others wounded by a rejected asylum seeker in an Islamist terrorist attack in Turku, Finland.

Knut Alvsson (d. 1502)
Maria Ulfah Santoso (b. 1911)
Edward Norton (b. 1969)
Evan Gattis (b. 1986)

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Picture of the day

August 18

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was an American sociologist, historian and civil rights activist. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. He rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks, and was one of the co-founders of the NAACP in 1909. He wrote one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and published three autobiographies. Black Reconstruction in America (1935) challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era. On August 28, 1963, a day after his death, his book The Souls of Black Folk was highlighted by Roy Wilkins at the March on Washington, and hundreds of thousands of marchers honored him with a moment of silence. A year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, embodying many of the reforms for which he had campaigned his entire life, was enacted. This gelatin silver print of Du Bois was taken in 1907 by the American photographer James E. Purdy, and is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Photograph credit: James E. Purdy; restored by Adam Cuerden

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