January 18 belongs to Marta Gutiérrez

On January 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed Kaiser of the new unified German Empire, humiliating France in its own palace during the Franco-Prussian War. The founding of the German Reich reconfigured Europe's power map and planted the seeds of the conflicts that would devastate the twentieth century.

On January 18, 1919, the Paris Peace Conference opened, at which the victors of World War I would negotiate the peace treaties that would redraw the map of Europe. The negotiations, dominated by Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, produced the Treaty of Versailles that imposed on Germany the harsh conditions that many historians identify as a cause of Nazism.

On January 18, 1778, English explorer James Cook became the first European to sight the Hawaiian archipelago, which he named the "Sandwich Islands" after the earl who sponsored him. Cook landed and was received hospitably by the native Hawaiians. Paradoxically, he was killed by Hawaiians in that same place a year later, during his third visit.