Today in History: March 18, deadliest US tornado strikes Midwest

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Today is Wednesday, March 18, the 77th day of 2026. There are 288 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On March 18, 1925, nearly 700 people died when the Tri-State Tornado struck southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana; it remains the deadliest single tornado in U.S. history.

Also on this date:

In 1922, Mohandas K. Gandhi was sentenced in India to six years’ imprisonment for civil disobedience. (He was released after serving two years.)

In 1937, in America’s worst school disaster, nearly 300 people — most of them children — were killed in a natural gas explosion at the New London Consolidated School in Rusk County, Texas.

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which forced Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II.

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Gideon v. Wainwright, ruled unanimously that state courts were required to provide legal counsel to criminal defendants who could not afford to hire an attorney on their own.

In 1965, the first spacewalk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov went outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.

In 1990, two thieves posing as police officers subdued security guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Art in Boston and stole 13 works of art valued at over $500 million in the biggest art heist in history; the works have not been recovered.

In 2014, Russia under President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, a bold land grab that set the stage for Russia's eventual full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In 2018, a self-driving Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in the first death involving a fully autonomous test vehicle.

In 2025, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth on a SpaceX capsule after spending more than nine months aboard the International Space Station; their mission was supposed to last about a week but was prolonged, in large part, by problems with the Boeing Starliner capsule that delivered them to the station.

Today’s Birthdays: Composer John Kander is 99. Actor Brad Dourif is 76. Jazz musician Bill Frisell is 75. Filmmaker Luc Besson is 67. TV personality Mike Rowe is 64. Singer-actor Vanessa L. Williams is 63. Olympic speed skating gold medalist Bonnie Blair is 62. Rapper-actor Queen Latifah is 56. Actor-comedian Dane Cook is 54. Singer Adam Levine (Maroon 5) is 47. Actor Lily Collins is 37. Actor Ciara Bravo is 29.