On August 18

On this day in ...
... 1587, days after her family had arrived with other colonists at Roanoke Island on the mid-Atlantic coast (now North Carolina), Virginia Dare, the 1st child of English descent, was born in what is now the United States of America. The Roanoke Colony vanished, however, and Virginia along with it, under conditions unknown to this day. (credit for 1937 stamp commemorating Dare's birth)
... 1992, during an international inspection of 2 detention sites, the leader of the delegation, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, then France's Humanitarian Affairs Minister (today, its Foreign Minister), called the Serbian detention camps "'hell on earth.'" by the man leading a delegation to inspect them. The visit came a week after TV crews at the Trnopolje camp broadcast "[i]mages of severely emaciated internees behind barbed wire fences" that led "to comparisons with the horrors of Nazi concentration camps." Abuse at camps would be the subject of numerous cases at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, established the following year by the U.N. Security Council.

(Prior August 18 posts are here and here.)

On April 11

On this day in ...
... 1713 (295 years ago today), a series of pacts known collectively as the Peace of Utrecht were signed in that Dutch city. Signatories to these documents that signaled the end of Queen Anne's War in North America -- named in recognition of the English monarch at right -- included England, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. Together the treaties "put an end to French expansion and signaled the rise of the British Empire."
... 1911, Stanisława Walasiewicz was born in Poland. When she was 2 she and her family immigrated to the United States, where she became a runner. Competing for Poland in the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, her time of 11.9 seconds broke the world record for 100 meters; in the same race at the 1936 Games in Berlin, she lost to Helen Stephens. (See a copyright-protected photo of the 2 of them shaking hands after that race here.) Walasiewicz became a U.S. citizen and married a boxer in 1947, and, as Stella Walsh Olsen (left), won her last U.S. championship 4 years later. She and Stephens both entered the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1975. Killed in an armed robbery in 1980 in Cleveland, upon autopsy Walsh Olsen was discovered to possess male as well as female genitals, a condition that before 1992 would have, if known, disqualified an athlete from official competition. (photo credit)