What happened on 18 December?

11 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1878 Born: Joseph Stalin Soviet dictator from 1924-1953; industrialised the USSR at the cost of millions of lives.
2. 1978 Reform and Opening Up Deng's economic liberalisation that turns China into a manufacturing superpower.
3. 1892 Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Christmas ballet that has become a December staple worldwide.
4. 1856 Born: J. J. Thomson British physicist; discovered the electron.
5. 2019 Trump impeachment 1 (Ukraine) First Trump impeachment over Ukraine pressure call.
6. 1979 CEDAW adopted by the UN The international bill of rights for women, ratified by most of the world.
7. 2005 Evo Morales elected President of Bolivia Bolivia elects its first indigenous president, who nationalises gas and reshapes the Andean nation's politics.
8. 2022 Argentina wins 2022 FIFA World Cup Messi finally lifts the World Cup in Qatar.
9. 2009 Avatar James Cameron's 3-D spectacle becomes the highest-grossing film in history.
10. 1972 Operation Linebacker II The 'Christmas Bombing' of Hanoi and Haiphong, which pushed North Vietnam back to the Paris peace talks.
11. 1912 Piltdown Man hoax 'The earliest Englishman' — a human skull with an orangutan jaw, planted in a Sussex gravel pit — is unveiled to the Geological Society. It warped human-origins research for forty