Today in History....October 18

* 1648, Boston Shoemakers form first U.S. labor organization

* 1748, signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ends the War of the Austrian Succession

* 1767, Mason-Dixon line, survey separating Maryland from Pennsylvania is completed

* 1851, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale by Richard Bentley of London

* 1860, the Second Opium War finally ends at the Convention of Peking with the ratification of the Treaty of Tientsin, an unequal treaty

* 1867, United States takes possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for $7.2 million

* 1892, the first long-distance telephone line between New York and Chicago was officially opened (it could only handle one call at a
time)

* 1898, United States takes possession of Puerto Rico

* 1925, the Grand Ole Opry opens

* 1929, women are considered "persons" under law in Canada

* 1944, Adolf Hitler, ym"sh, orders the establishment of a German national militia. ALSO: Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia

* 1945, the USSR's nuclear program receives plans for the USA's plutonium bomb from Klaus Fuchs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. ALSO: A group of the Venezuelan Armed Forces, led by Mario Vargas, Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, staged a coup d'etát against then president Isaías Medina Angarita, who was definitely overthrown by the end of the day

* 1954, Texas Instruments announces the first transistor radio

* 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, visiting Tokyo, said the U.S. was willing to use its full military might to defend Japan in light of North Korea's nuclear test. ALSO: The Dow Jones industrial average passed 12,000 for the first time before pulling back to close at 11,992.68