July 18 in History

At the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast named Nadia Comaneci earned the first perfect score of 10.0 in Olympic gymnastics history. Her routine on the uneven bars, performed during the team competition in July, made her an international celebrity almost overnight and helped turn gymnastics into one of the most-watched events of the Games.

The Rwandan genocide, in which extremist Hutu forces and militias killed an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people, most of them Tutsi, in roughly 100 days, ended in mid-1994 when the Rangers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took control of most of the country. The killing is remembered as one of the fastest and most thorough genocides of the twentieth century, and as a lasting indictment of the international community's failure to intervene.