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Monday, Jan. 1:
45 BCE: The Julian Calendar takes effect
in the Roman Empire, establishing January 1
as the start of the new year.
1863: President Abraham Lincoln issued
the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring
that slaves in rebel states shall be
“forever free.”
1892: The Ellis Island Immigrant Station
in New York formally opened.
1942: The Rose Bowl was played in Durham,
North Carolina, instead of Pasadena,
California, because of security concerns
in the wake of Japan’s attack on
Pearl Harbor; in it, Oregon State defeated
Duke, 20-16.
1953: Hank Williams Sr., among the
most important singers and songwriters
in country music history, was discovered
dead at age 29 in the back seat
of his car during a stop in Oak Hill, West
Virginia, while he was being driven to a
concert date in Canton, Ohio.
1954: NBC broadcast the first coast-to-coast
color TV program as it presented
live coverage of the Tournament of
Roses Parade in Pasadena, California.
1959: Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries
overthrew Cuban leader Fulgencio
Batista, who fled to the Dominican Republic.
1975: A jury in Washington found Nixon
administration officials John N. Mitchell,
H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman
guilty of charges related to the Watergate
cover-up.
1984: The breakup of AT&T took place
as the telecommunications giant was
divested of its 22 Bell System companies
under terms of an antitrust agreement.
1985: The music cable channel VH-1,
intended as a more adult alternative to
MTV, made its debut with a video of
Marvin Gaye performing “The Star-
Spangled Banner.”
1993: Czechoslovakia peacefully split
into two new countries, the Czech Republic
and Slovakia.
2006: The Medicare prescription drug
plan went into effect.
2013: In Maryland, same-sex marriage
became legal in the first state south of
the Mason-Dixon Line.
2014: The nation’s first legal recreational
marijuana shops opened in Colorado.
2017: California launched legal sales of
recreational marijuana.
I'm old enough to remember most of these events. LOL
Good “Historical Trivia” — In the wake of th Dec 7th, 1941 surprise attack on Pear Harbor, Pasadena was deemed at risk and the ‘Rose Bowl’ was moved to Duke’s home Stadium in Durham, NC. That 🏈 game might be their only trip to a National Championship Football Game.
Another bit of trivia - January was named after the Roman god Janus, who had two faces - one looking forward and one looking back... and January as the first month of the year looks forward to the new year and looks back to review the previous year...
Tuesday, May 28:
1830: President Andrew Jackson signed
the Indian Removal Act, which led to
the displacement of more than 60,000
indigenous people over the course of
more than a decade and moved them
west of the Mississippi River.
1892: The Sierra Club was founded in
San Francisco by John Muir.
1934: The Dionne quintuplets, the first
to syrvive infancy, were born in Callander,
Canada.
1937: The Nazi Party’s German Labor
Front established the automaker Volkswagen.
1964: The Palestinian Liberation Organization
was founded, with the Palestine
National Charter of 1964 announcing
the goal of establishing an Arab homeland
with the borders used for what was
previously known as the British Mandate
and declaring the creation of Israel
to be illegal. The PLO later accepted
Israeli sovereignty and instead sought
statehood for Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip.
2016: After a 3-year-old boy fell into an
enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo, the
gorilla Harambe grabbed the child and
dragged him through the enclosure,
prompting the zoo’s Dangerous Animal
Response Team to shoot and kill the
gorilla.
Monday, May 27:
1930: The Chrysler Building in New York
was completed and opened, briefly
becoming the world’s tallest building
and tallest structure. The 1,046-foot
height surpassed 40 Wall Street (also in
New York) and the Eiffel Tower, but the
following year the Empire State Building
topped them all.
1937: The Golden Gate Bridge, spanning
the strait that connects the Pacific
Ocean to San Francisco Bay, opened to
pedestrians. The following day, it
opened to vehicles.
1939: Most of the 937 Jewish refugees
aboard the St. Louis, a German ship,
were turned away by Cuba, which had
changed its immigration policy just
weeks earlier. The ship then carried the
refugees to the United States, where
they were again turned away before
returning to Europe in search of safe
harbor.
1962: A fire was started to clear out
room at the landfill used by Centralia,
Pennsylvania. The fire is considered by
many to be the event that sparked the
vast underground fires in the coal
mines under the area that have caused
health issues, forced evacuations and
are still burning.
2016: Barack Obama became the
first U. S. president to visit Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Park and meet
Hibakusha, people affected by the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki during World War II.
Sunday, May 26:
1896: Czar Nicholas II of Russia was
crowned.
1897: Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” was published
in London.
1924: Amid changing demographics and
post-World War I fear of communism,
the Immigration Act of 1924 went into
effect, limiting immigration from some
countries and barring immigration from
Asia.
1927: On the last day of production for
the iconic vehicle, Edsel and Henry Ford
drove out of the plant in the 15 millionth
Ford Model T.
1937: In what became known as the
Battle of the Overpass, representatives
of the United Auto Workers union were
severely beaten as they handed out
literature at an overpass approaching
the main gate to Ford’s River Rouge
plant in Dearborn, Michigan, which they
were trying to organize. The attack
turned public opinion for the union, and
Ford eventually signed a contract with
the UAW.
1938: The House Committee on Un-
American Activities was formed to investigate
U.S. citizens accused of disloyalty
or subversive activities, including
ties to communism.
1998: In New Jersey v. New York, the U. S.
Supreme Court ruled that Ellis Island,
famous for welcoming millions of immigrants,
is mainly located in New Jersey, not New York.
Saturday, May 25:
240 BCE: Halley's Comet was first
recorded reaching its perihelion (point
closest to the sun). The next one will
be in 2061.
1935: In the span of 45 minutes at a
conference meet, Ohio State University
student-athlete Jesse Owens set three
world records (long jump, 26-21⁄8; 220-
yard dash, 20.3 seconds; 220-yard low
hurdles, 22.6 seconds) and tied a fourth
(100-yard dash, 9.4 seconds).
1961: President John Kennedy proposed
to Congress what became the
Apollo space program: “I believe that
this nation should commit itself to
achieving the goal, before this decade
is out, of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.”
1977: The sci-fi film “Star Wars” was
released in just a few dozen theaters. It
caught on, however, and soon spread to
a wide release.
2020: With a police officer kneeling on
his neck and back for more than nine
minutes, George Floyd died in Minneapolis,
spurring widespread protests.
The white officer, Derek Chauvin, was
convicted the following year of murdering
Floyd and sentenced to 15 years in
prison and 7 1⁄2 years parole.
Friday, May 24:
1626: Dutch merchant Peter Minuit
purchased Manhattan Island from the
Lenape people (also known as Lenni Lenape
or Delaware people.
1844: Samuel Morse sent a message –
“What hath God wrought?” – from
Washington, D.C., to a train station in
Baltimore using Morse code to demonstrate
his electric telegraph system.
1883: A project whose construction
spanned more than a decade was finally
opened to the public, and thousands
came to the dedication of the first steel
suspension bridge and largest suspension
bridge at the time. The Brooklyn
Bridge connected Manhattan to Brooklyn
over the East River with a roadway for
vehicles and a walkway for pedestrians.
1988: Legislation is enacted in the United
Kingdom that says local authorities
“shall not intentionally promote homosexuality.”
It was repealed in Scotland in
2000 and in England and Wales in 2003.
1994: Sentences of 240 years in prison
each were handed down to Mohammed
Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmud Abouhalima
and Ahmad Ajaj, who had in
March been convicted in the 1993
World Trade Center bombing that killed
six people and injured more than 1,000.
2022: A mass shooting carried out by
18-year-old Salvador Ramos at Robb
Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas,
killed 19 children and two teachers. Law
enforcement shot and killed Ramos, but
the responding agencies received intense
criticism for a flawed and delayed
intervention.
Thursday, May 23:
1911: The New York Public Library
was dedicated.
1920: Harvard University’s president
and four other administrators formed
what became known as the Secret
Court to investigate students suspected
of being gay or associating with gay
students. Several were expelled. The
Secret Court did not come to light until
documents were discovered in 2002.
1934: Notorious killers Bonnie Parker
and Clyde Barrow, whose crime spree
spread across several states, were ambushed
by police from Louisiana and
Texas and killed on a highway near
Sailes, Louisiana.
1995: The first version of the programming
language Java was released.
Wednesday, May 22:
1819: The SS Savannah set sail from
Georgia, becoming the first steamship
to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
1856: U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks, a proslavery
congressman from South Carolina,
severely beat abolitionist Sen.
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with
his cane in the Senate chamber. Sumner
had recently given a speech critical of
slaveholders, including one of Brooks’
relatives, Sen. Andrew Butler of South
Carolina.
2002: A jury in Birmingham, Alabama,
convicted former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby
Cherry on four counts of first-degree
murder for the deaths of four Black girls
in a church bombing in 1963. Cherry was
sentenced to life in prison and died there
in 2004 of cancer.
2015: Ireland became the first nation in
the world to legalize same-sex marriage
by popular vote, with 62% of voters approving
the constitutional amendment
declaring “marriage may be contracted in
accordance with law by two persons
without distinction as to their sex.”
I'm currently reading Carl Sandberg's "Lincoln - The Prairie Years and War Years" (two volumes published together in one book). I believe that episode w/Brooks in 1856 was mentioned. One of the interesting recurring themes is that Lincoln was foremost for preserving the Union, even if it meant keeping slavery in southern slave states intact. He believed slavery could be phased out over time. Obviously he eventually came around (and issued the Emancipation Proclamation).
Tuesday, May 21:
1792: Following months of earthquakes
and eruptions, a lava dome collapsed
on Mount Unzen in Japan. The landslide
and a tsunami killed about 15,000 people,
according to estimates.
1881: The American National Red Cross
was founded by Clara Barton.
1901: Connecticut became the first
state to pass a speed limit law, dictating
that no motor vehicle could exceed
12 mph in cities or 15 mph outside city
limits. Violation of the law could prompt
a fine of up to $200 for each offense.
1904: Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA) was founded in Paris.
1972: A vandal at St. Peter’s Basilica in
Vatican City used a hammer to damage
Michaelangelo’s Pieta, a marble statue
depicting Mary holding the body of Jesus,
breaking off one of Mary’s arms and damaging
her face. The Pieta was restored
and protected with bulletproof glass.
Monday, May 20:
1609: William Shakespeare’s sonnets
were first published in London.
1814: Statesman and Father of Confederation
Sir George-Étienne Carter was born in
Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, Canada.
1862: President Abraham Lincoln signed
the Homestead Act, which granted 160
acres of federal land to some U.S. citizens
after they had worked that land for five
years and paid a filing fee. Ten percent of
the area of the United States – roughly
270 million acres – were claimed.
1927: Aboard the Spirit of St. Louis,
Charles Lindbergh took off from Long
Island, New York, to begin his transatlantic
flight to Paris. He landed the
next day, becoming the first pilot to
make the solo, nonstop flight across the
Atlantic Ocean.
1961: Freedom Riders arriving in Montgomery,
Alabama, were attacked by a
white mob and beaten, some of them
hospitalized. The violence spurred U.S.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy to
send in hundreds of U.S. Marshals to
keep the peace.
1983: The first research into what later
became known as HIV – the underlying
cause of Acquired Immunodeficiency
Syndrome (AIDS) – was published in the
journal Science.
Sunday, May 19:
1536: The second wife of Britain’s King
Henry V, Anne Boleyn, was executed.
She had been convicted of adultery,
incest and treason, though many historians
have suggested the charges were
false.
1897: Author and poet Oscar Wilde was
released from prison, having served
two years of hard labor on charges
related to homosexuality, which was a
crime at the time in England.
1910: Earth passed through the tail of
Halley’s Comet. There were some who
predicted dire outcomes, and panic led
to sales of “comet pills” supposed to
protect people from gas from the comet,
but the event came and went without
incident.
1962: During a gala celebrating U. S.
President John F. Kennedy's birthday
at Madison Square Garden in New York
City, Marilyn Monroe sang a very
sexy and sultry Happy Birthday Mr. President.
1963: Excerpts from Martin Luther King
Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” were
published in New York Post Sunday
Magazine.
2022: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention’s Advisory Committee
on Immunizations Practices recommended
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine
boosters for those ages 5-11, as well as
a second booster for those 50 and older
and those 12 and older who are immunocompromised.
Saturday, May 18:
1291: The siege of Acre ended, as
did the Christian Crusaders' control of
Jerusalem.
1896: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-1
in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation
laws with accommodations that were
“separate but equal” were constitutional.
1917: Needing to raise a force larger
than the army of volunteers the United
States had, President Woodrow Wilson
signed the Selective Service Act to
build the American armed forces
through conscription to aid the Allies
during World War I.
1980: After nearly two months of activity,
Mount St. Helens erupted in southern
Washington. The eruption killed 57
people, destroyed or damaged 200
homes and two bridges, and deposited
immeasurable amounts of ash across 11
states.
Friday, May 17:
1954: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled
unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education
that state laws segregating public
schools were unconstitutional.
1973: The televised U.S. Senate hearings
investigating the Watergate scandal
began.
1974: The Los Angeles Police threw tear
gas into a home in Compton to try to
force six members of the Symbionese
Liberation Army to come out, but the
canisters started a fire. All six members
of the SLA were killed in either the
shootout that followed or the fire.
1990:The World Health Organization
removed homosexuality from the International
Statistical Classification of
Diseases and Related Health Problems.
2004: Tanya McCloskey and Marcia
Kadish became the first legally married
same-sex couple in the United States
during a morning ceremony in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Thursday, May 16:
1764: Catherine the Great founded
the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens
in Saint Petersburg, Europe's first public
education institution for girls.
1866: Congress authorized creation of
the five-cent coin, the nickel.
1920: Joan of Arc was canonized by
Pope Benedict XV, elevating her to
sainthood.
1929: The first Academy Awards ceremony
took place. “Wings” won the
award for Outstanding Picture, Emil
Jannings the award for Best Actor and
Janet Gaynor the award for Best Actress.
1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ended.
The resistance from Jewish prisoners
in the ghetto began less than a
month earlier after it was ordered that
the remaining prisoners be transported
to death camps in Nazi Germany-occupied
Poland.
1966: The iconic Beach Boys album “Pet
Sounds” was released. Bob Dylan’s
iconic album “Blonde on Blonde” was
also scheduled to be released on this
date, but delays pushed back that album’s
release into the summer.
1975: Japanese mountaineer Junko
Tabei became the first woman to summit
Mount Everest.
1988: A report from U.S. Surgeon General
C. Everett Koop said nicotine is
addictive, comparing it to other addictive
substances like alcohol, heroin and
cocaine.
Wednesday, May 15:
1800: President John Adams ordered
the federal government to move from
Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.
1940: The first McDonald’s restaurant
was opened in San Bernardino, California,
by brothers Richard and Maurice
McDonald.
1988: The Soviet Union began withdrawing
its troops from Afghanistan,
where it had supported a pro-communist
government against Muslim rebels
in the Soviet-Afghan War since 1979.
2010: Sixteen-year-old Australian sailor
Jessica Watson became the youngest
person to sail solo and non-stop around
the world.
Tuesday, May 14:
1607: The first permanent English settlement
in North America is founded,
first as James Fort and later as Jamestown
in the colony of Virginia.
1804: The expedition led by Meriwether
Lewis and William Clark left on its westward
mission to survey the Northwest. It was largely
aided by American Indian Sacagawea.
1948: Israel declared itself an independent
Jewish state after the British withdrawal
from what was then known as
Palestine. Almost immediately, the 1948
Arab-Israeli War began.
2021: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention found that mRNA
vaccines for COVID-19 made by Pfizer
and Moderna reduced the risk of infection
by approximately 94%.
2022: A mass shooting perpetrated by
Payton Gendron killed 10 people, all
Black, and injured three at a supermarket
in Buffalo, New York. Gendron
pleaded guilty to all state charges including
murder and hate-motivated
terrorism.
Monday, May 13:
1568: Mary, Queen of Scots was
defeated at the Battle of Langside during
the Marian civil war in Scotland (1568 - 1573).
1846: The United States declared war
on Mexico. Texas had been admitted to
the union the previous year, and the
two nations could not agree on the
location of the new state’s southern
border.
1864: On land formerly of Gen. Robert
Lee’s estate, Arlington National Cemetery
interred its first soldier.
1908: At the Governors’ Conference on
the Conservation of Natural Resources,
a meeting that made conservation issues
a more public priority, President
Theodore Roosevelt said in his address,
“the occasion for the meeting lies in the
fact that the natural resources of our
country are in danger of exhaustion if
we permit the old wasteful methods of
exploiting them longer to continue.”
1973: In the first Battle of the Sexes
tennis match, Bobby Riggs defeated
Margaret Court, 6-2, 6-1.
1981: Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John
Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The
pope was wounded but survived. Agca
was subdued, convicted and sentenced
to life in prison, then pardoned by Italy
in 2000.
1985: The Philadelphia Police Department
bombed a residential building in
an attempt to force out members of the
Black activist organization MOVE, for
whom police had warrants for charges
ranging from parole violation to illegal
possession of firearms and making
terroristic threats. The bombing and
resulting fire killed 11 people, including
children, and destroyed 61 homes.
Sunday, May 12:
1780: Under siege for more than a
month, American forces suffered their
worst defeat of the Revolutionary War
when they surrendered Charleston,
South Carolina, to the British.
1932: The body of toddler Charles Lindbergh
Jr., son of the famous aviator,
was discovered near the family’s estate.
He had been kidnapped from his bedroom
March 1, and a ransom of $50,000
had been paid. Richard Hauptmann was
later arrested and convicted of the
crime, then executed.
1948: Queen Wilhelmina of the
Netherlands abdicated, ceding the throne
to her daughter Juliana.
1982: A Spanish priest, the Rev. Juan
María Fernándezy Krohn, attempted to
kill Pope John Paul II in Fatima, Portugal.
The assailant stabbed the pope
with a bayonet, but the assassination
attempt was unsuccessful.
2015: A train bound for New York City
derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight
and injuring more than 200. The train
was found to have been traveling at
twice the speed limit for the stretch of
track carrying it.
2022: The number of U.S. deaths due to
COVID-19 reached 1 million.
Saturday, May 11:
868: The earliest known dated and printed
book, a copy of “Diamond Sutra,” was
published. Printed from wood blocks, the
Buddhist text was dated, marked for
general distribution and dedicated to the
printer’s parents.
1812: The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister
Spencer Perceval was assassinated,
shot in the lobby of the House of Commons.
1858: Minnesota became the 38th state.
1894: In response to reductions in wages,
workers at a Pullman factory in Chicago
began a wildcat strike, which is undertaken
without the approval of union leadership.
The strike and a national railroad
boycott that began in June eventually led
to President Grover Cleveland sending
federal troops to Chicago to enforce an
injunction barring union officials from
directing or encouraging workers to not
do their jobs.
1934: A dust storm that began two days
earlier in the plains carried dust as far as
the East Coast, depositing it in cities from
Boston to Washington, D.C.
1947: The B.F. Goodrich Co. announced it
had created a tubeless tire, no longer in
need of an inner tube. The company was
granted patents in 1952, and the tires
soon became standard on new vehicles.
1981: Reggae star Bob Marley died of
cancer at age 36. He was first diagnosed
in 1977, but the cancer spread through
his body in 1980.
1981: More than a year before its appearance
on Broadway in New York, the musical
“Cats” premiered in London’s West
End at the New London Theatre and ran
through May 11, 2002.
1987: In an operation at Johns Hopkins
Hospital in Baltimore, Clinton House became
the first live heart donor in the
United States. House needed new lungs,
and as it was deemed safer to perform a
lung-and-heart transplant than transplant
just the lungs, House received a
new heart and lungs from an accident
victim. His healthy heart was transplanted
to John Couch.
1990: The first wide-release film about
AIDS, “Longtime Companion,” opens in
New York. The film had had showings at
festivals for several months before opening
to the wider public. Bruce Davison’s
role earned him an Academy Award nomination
for best supporting actor.
1996:ValuJet Flight 592, a DC-9 aircraft,
crashed in Florida’s Everglades, killing all
110 people onboard.
1997: In a rematch after an upgrade, IBM
computer Deep Blue defeated chess
grandmaster Garry Kasparov. It was the
first time a world champion had lost a
match with standard time controls to a
computer. In their 1996 match, Kasparov
prevailed four games to two. In the rematch,
Deep Blue won two games, Kasparov
one, and three games were draws.
2020: President Donald Trump spoke to
the nation from the White House Rose
Garden to say anyone who wants a coronavirus
test can get one and to encourage
businesses to reopen.
Friday, May 10:
1773: Britain’s Parliament passed the Tea
Act in an effort to save the East India
Company from its financial woes. Later
that year, fallout from the measure led
American colonists in Boston to organize
the Boston Tea Party.
1774: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
became the king and queen of France.
1775: During the Revolutionary War, Ethan
Allen and Benedict Arnold led the
Green Mountain Boys in the capture of
Fort Ticonderoga from the British. Cannons
and more were taken from the fort to
Boston to bolster the colonists there.
1865: Confederate President Jefferson
Davis was captured by Union Troops near
Irwinville, Georgia. Davis had planned to
escape to Texas and build a new Confederacy,
but he was captured by Union
forces despite wearing a disguise, his
wife’s cloak and shawl.
1869: The United States was connected
from coast to coast by the first transcontinental
railroad. The ceremonial Golden
Spike was driven during a ceremony on
Promontory Summit in Utah Territory to
mark the joining of the Union Pacific and
Central Pacific railways.
1872: Victoria Woodhull was nominated
by the Equal Rights Party, which she had
helped establish, as a candidate for president.
She is considered the first woman
to run for president in the U.S., though
women had not yet been allowed to vote.
The suffragist aimed to change that. The
party nominated Fredrick Douglas for
vice president, but he did not acknowledge
the nomination.
1924: J. Edgar Hoover began his 48-year
tenure leading the FBI when he was appointed
acting director of the Bureau of
Investigation, which was later renamed.
He was promoted to director later in the
year.
1940: Winston Churchill became prime
minister of the United Kingdom after the
resignation of Neville Chamberlain.
1962: Marvel Comics published its first
issue of “The Incredible Hulk.”
1975: Sony released its Betamax video
cassette recorder in Japan.
1994: South Africa inaugurated its first
Black president, Nelson Mandela, the
anti-apartheid activist had been imprisoned
27 years until his release in 1990.
1994: Serial killer John Wayne Gacy, convicted
of 33 counts of murder, was executed
by lethal injection.
1996: Eight climbers died on Mount Everest
when they were caught in a blizzard
while descending from the summit.
2002: Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen,
who had admitted to spying for the Soviet
Union and Russia, was sentenced to life
in prison without the possibility of parole.
2005:A grenade was thrown but failed to
detonate during a speech by U.S. President
George W. Bush in Tbilisi in the Eastern
European nation of Georgia. Vladimir
Arutinian, a Georgia citizen, was convicted
of trying to assassinate Bush and
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Arutinian was sentenced to life in prison.
2021: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration
expanded emergency use authorization
for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to allow
people ages 12-15 to be inoculated.
Thursday, May 9:
1867: Sojourner Truth, a former slave who
had escaped to freedom and become an
advocate for the rights of Black Americans
and women, spoke at the first meeting
of the American Equal Rights Association
in New York. As Black men were gaining
some of their rights, Truth spoke of
the need to press for the rights of Black
women.
1914:At the urging of Congress, President
Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation
declaring the second Sunday in May
to be Mother’s Day. The next day, May 10,
marked the first time it was celebrated as
a national holiday in the United States,
though some states had been celebrating
mothers for years before the federal
government joined in.
1955: Having become an independent
nation just four days earlier with the withdrawal
of American and British troops,
West Germany joined NATO.
1960: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration
approved the first commercial birth
control pill, Enovid.
1964: The Beatles had their 3 1/2-month
run atop the Billboard Hot 100 ended by
Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly.” The Beatles’
run was the longest, at the time, for
any pop act.
1974: The U.S. House of Representatives
began the process of impeaching President
Richard Nixon. The hearings
stretched into July, when the Judiciary
Committee approved articles of impeachment
for obstruction of justice,
abuse of power and contempt of Congress.
Nixon resigned in August before
the full House took action.
1980: The freighter MV Summit Venture
collided with the Sunshine Skyway Bridge
in Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a portion
of the bridge to collapse. Several cars, a
truck and a Greyhound bus fell to the
water, killing 35 people.
1992: An underground methane explosion
at the Westray Mine in Nova Scotia,
Canada, killed 26 people.
2012: President Barack Obama became
the first sitting U.S. president to endorse
same-sex marriage. “I’ve just concluded
that for me personally it is important for
me to go ahead and affirm that I think
same-sex couples should be able to get
married,” Obama told ABC News.
2020: The U.S. unemployment rate
reached its highest mark since the Great
Depression, 14.7%.
2022: President Joe Biden signed the
Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease
Act of 2022, which the previous month
had passed unanimously in the Senate
and by a vote of 417-10 in the House of
Representatives. The legislation facilitated
easier “loan and lease of defense articles”
to the nation for its war with Russia,
but it expired at the end of September
2023.
Wednesday, May 8:
1541: During his party’s long and far-ranging
exploration of North America,
Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto
reached the Mississippi River. He is credited
as the first European to document
the river.
1792: Congress passed the second Militia
Act of 1792, which said every “free able-bodied
white male citizen” between 18
and 45 must enroll in their state’s militia.
Just a few days earlier, the first Militia Act
of 1792 had given the president the power
to call up state militias to protect
against invasion or put down rebellions.
1886: Coca-Cola first went on sale at
Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta for 5 cents
per glass.
1945: Allied forces celebrated V-E Day, for
victory in Europe during World War II after
Germany’s unconditional surrender. The
surrender went into effect late at night. In
Russia and some former Soviet states, it
was already May 9, and so some of them
celebrate that date each year.
1950: Jackie Robinson became the first
Black person to be featured on the cover
of Life magazine.
1973: Members of the American Indian
Movement ended their occupation of
Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation
in South Dakota. During the 71-day
occupation, two men were shot and killed
by federal agents, and several others
were injured. A surrender was agreed
upon in exchange for officials agreeing to
investigate the group’s complaints
against the government.
1980: The World Health Assembly endorsed
a claim made by scientists the
previous December verifying the global
eradication of smallpox.
1988: Stella Nickell was convicted of using
cyanide to poison her husband, Bruce
Nickell, and a stranger. Nickell was found
to have poisoned Excedrin capsules to kill
her husband in order to claim a life insurance
payout and later poisoned several
bottles of Excedrin that were placed on a
store shelf, one of which killed Sue Snow.
1999: Nancy Mace became the first woman
to graduate from The Citadel military
college.
2010: Betty White, 88 at the time, became
the oldest person to host “Saturday Night
Live.” White earned good reviews and
later won an Emmy Award for Outstanding
Guest Actress in a Comedy Series her
appearance.
2020: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration
authorized the first COVID-19
test that had the option of using saliva
samples collected at home.
Tuesday, May 7:
1763: Ottawa chief Pontiac and a coalition
of tribes began a rebellion against the
British. They began a siege of British
forces at Fort Detroit that lasted into
October.
1824: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony debuted in Vienna, Austria.
The deaf composer shared the stage with
conductor Michael Umlauf, both of them
conducting, but the orchestra (the largest
ever used by Beethoven) was instructed
to ignore Beethoven and follow
Umlauf.
1896: Serial killer H.H. Holmes was
hanged in Philadelphia for the one murder
for which he was convicted.
1915: A German submarine sank the Lusitania,
a British ocean liner. Of the nearly
2,000 people who died, 128 were Americans.
The United States had so far remained
neutral, not being drawn into
World War I until 1917.
1945: Germany’s Gen. Alfred Jodl signed
the nation’s unconditional surrender to
the Allies at Reims, France. Another surrender
document was signed the following
day in Berlin, bringing an end to the
war in Europe.
1946: The Japanese company Tokyo
Tsushin Kogyo was founded, later changing
its name to Sony.
1946: William Hastie Jr. was inaugurated
as the first Black governor of the United
States Virgin Islands. Hastie had previously
served as a U.S. District Court judge
in the American territory, and he later
became a judge and senior judge in the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third District.
1954: Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh
forces defeated French troops at Dien
Bien Phu in Vietnam. The battle had lasted
nearly two months. Soon after their
defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French
agreed to end military deployment in its
colonies in French Indochina.
1963: Communications satellite Telstar 2
was launched into orbit by NASA. The
satellite carried out an experiment to take
measurements of the Van Allen belts and
relay information to Earth in real time.
1994: A version of Edvard Munch’s famous
painting “The Scream,” which had
been stolen Feb. 12 from a museum in
Norway, was recovered.
1998: German automaker Daimler-Benz
announced the acquisition of Chrysler
Corporation in a $36 billion merger, creating
DaimlerChrysler AG.
2000: Vladimir Putin is inaugurated as
Russia’s president. He had been acting
president since December 31, 1999, when
Boris Yeltsin resigned.
2019: During a school shooting at STEM
School Highlands Ranch, a charter school
in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, 18-yearold
Kendrick Castillo was shot and killed
while trying to subdue one of two shooters.
Eight other students were injured.
Alec McKinney, 16 at the time of the
shooting, pleaded guilty to 17 charges
and was sentenced to life with a chance
for parole after 40 years. Devon Erickson,
18 at the time of the shooting, was convicted
of 46 charges and sentenced to life
without parole plus 1,282 years.
Monday, May 6:
1882: President Chester Arthur signed
the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning most
immigration from China for 10 years.
Exemptions were made for people with
certain occupations. The law also barred
Chinese immigrants from naturalized
citizenship.
1935: President Franklin Roosevelt issued
an executive order to create the Works
Progress Administration. The Great Depression
initiative employed millions of
Americans on public works projects.
1937: Germany’s dirigible, the Hindenburg,
the largest ever built, burst into
flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The
airship was attempting to dock when the
hydrogen used to keep it aloft ignited.
1940: John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction for his novel “The Grapes
of Wrath.” The story of a family of sharecroppers
spurred controversy as some
said it was too critical of capitalism, but
the story was adapted for a successful
film and the book became a regular fixture
in high school and college classrooms.
1954: Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute
mile in Oxford, England. Bannister
won his race in 3:59.4, breaking a barrier
that had frustrated many runners for
years. The world record had been 4:01.4,
set in 1945 by Sweden’s Gunder Hagg.
1957: The final episode of the TV show “I
Love Lucy,” starring Lucille Ball and Desi
Arnaz, aired.
1994: A former Arkansas state clerk, Paula
Jones, sued President Bill Clinton, saying
he sexually harassed her when he was
governor of Arkansas and defamed her
after she came forward with her accusation.
The ensuing investigation led to the
discovery of Clinton’s affair with White
House intern Monica Lewinsky.
1994: Queen Elizabeth II officially opened
the Channel Tunnel, aka the “Chunnel,”
connecting England to France.
1998: Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s
iMac. “We are targeting this for the No. 1
use consumers tell us they want a computer
for, which is to get on the internet,
simply and fast,” Jobs said. Onstage, Jobs
and his iMac outperformed a Compaq
computer in a “showdown” for the crowd
at the Macworld event.
2004: The final episode of the TV show
“Friends” aired. An estimated 52.5 million
people tuned in for the episode, “The Last
One,” ending a 10-season run.
2010: The Dow Jones Industrial Average
experienced its largest intraday drop in
its history as stocks plummeted in what
became known as a trillion-dollar flash
crash that lasted about 36 minutes. The
Dow dropped 998.5 points, about 9%,
but recovered much of the ground it had
lost before closing the day down 347.8
points, or 3.2%.
2013: Three women who had been kidnapped
between 2002 and 2004 and the
6-year-old daughter one of them had
while in captivity, fathered by kidnapper
Ariel Castro, were rescued. One of the
captives, Amanda Berry, escaped with
her daughter and contacted police, who
came to free Michelle Knight and Gina
DeJesus. Castro was arrested, pleaded
guilty more than 900 charges against him,
then died by suicide in prison Sept. 3.
2023: England celebrated the coronation
of King Charles III and his wife, Camilla, as
queen consort.