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Amendment XIX [1920] The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Over at View from the library, the anonymous librarian of the North Metro Technical College writes that she was unable to find anything about the auspicious date 26 August 1920 in the EB or in the EB’s Annals of America using the GALIILEO system.

Actually the event in question is listed on Britannica’s This Day in History (admittedly, not very prominently) and the top hit for a search for “August 26 1920″ is National American Woman Suffrage Association, which includes

Ratified by Congress in June 1919 and 36 states during 1919–20, the [19th] amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920, marking an end to a 72-year struggle.

See “Nineteenth Amendment” in the EB index and the the suffrage movement section of the feminism article for more. There is additional (free!) coverage in Britannica’s Women in American History spotlight.

(Institutional subscribes will find similiar information on schoool.eb.com, search.eb.com and related sites.

The tenth (1902-03) edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica included a volume dedicated to maps. Britannica.com makes a selection of them available for free at Cities of the World: Maps from the 10th Edition.

(From EB’s heritage page.)

In Britannica’s Roller Coasters: Inventing the Scream Machine Wired, Make, TheFeature.com, Boing Boing, etc. contributor David Pescovitz presents the history, physics and engineering of roller coasters through words, pictures and animation.

Britannica.com recently unveiled a new Encyclopædia Britannica Subject Browse, which provides an enormous taxonomy of human knowledge. The feature is currently marked “beta”.

392 years ago today, the Globe Theatre was destroyed by fire.

1613: London’s Globe Theatre destroyed by fire: During a performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII on this day, the thatch of the Globe Theatre was accidentally alighted by a cannon set off to mark the king’s entrance onstage. The theatre […] was destroyed within the hour. [I]t was rebuilt within a year of its destruction and continued to operate until 1642.

[via Britannica’s This Day in History: June 29]

Britannica.com has a number of 3-d renderings of the Globe Theatre, a map of London’s Theatre district circa 1600 and more at Shakespeare and the Globe: Then and Now.