1974 – (fictional) Seven Days in May, film: An attempted military coup against the President of the United States.
History for May 1
May 1 is Law Day, begun in 1958. “A national day set aside to celebrate the rule of law. Law Day underscores how law and the legal process have contributed to the freedoms that all Americans share.”
526 (Earthquake) Antioch, Byzantine Empire (Turkey)
1707 – The Act of Union joined the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland to form the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1759 – Josiah Wedgwood founded the Wedgwood pottery company in Great Britain.
1849 – The telegraph register was patented (#6,420) by Samuel F. B.Morse.
1851 -The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened in Hyde Park, London, England.
1888 – Nikola Tesla was issued several patents (#381,968, #381,969, #381,970; #382,279, #381,980, #381,981, #381,982) relating to the induction magnetic motor, alternating current (AC) sychronous motor, AC transmission and electricity distribution.
1899 – Bayer introduced aspirin in powder form, in Germany. The pill came about in 1915.
1931 – The Empire State Building in New York City was dedicated by President Hoover from the White House in Washington DC.
1951 – Great Exhibition opened in the Crystal Palace in London with over 10,000 exhibitors.
1958 – The discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth by James Van allen was published in the Washington Evening Star.
1941 – Citizen Kane debuted at the RKO Palace Theater in New York City.
1960 – American U-2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union.
1964 – The BASIC computer program was used for the first time at Dartmouth University by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. The name is an acronym for ‘Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code’.
1982 – The 1982 World’s Fair opened in Knoxville, Tennessee.
1983 – V miniseries began broadcasting on NBC.
1989 – Disney/MGM Studios opened at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida, United States.
1999 – Spongebob SquarePants premiered on Nickelodeon after the 1999 Kids’ Choice Awards.
2011 – Osama bin Laden was reported killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan.
History for May 2
1536 – Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, was arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason and witchcraft.
1611 – The King James Bible was published for the first time in London, England, by printer Robert Barker.
1670 – Hudson’s Bay Company was chartered by King Charles II of England.
1775 – Benjamin Franklin completed the first scientific study and chart of the Gulf Stream.
1885 – Good Housekeeping magazine began publication.
1918 – General Motors acquired the Chevrolet Motor Company.
1960 – Dick Clark concluded his second day of testimony in the Payola scandal, saving his career. “Believe me this is not as unusual as it may seem. I think the crime I have committed, if any, is that I made a great deal of money in a short time on little investment. But that is the record business.”
1965 – The Rolling Stones made their second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
1986 – The Citizens of Chernobyl were evacuated six days after the disaster
1982 – The Weather Channel began broadcasting in the US
2008 – Cyclone Nargis, Myanmar
2008 – Marvel’s Iron Man was released in theaters.
History for May 3
1375 BC -The first recorded eclipse occurred, noted in the area now known as Syria.
1802 – Washington, District of Columbia. was incorporated as a city.
1937 – Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
1951 – The Senate Armed Forces and Foreign Relations Committees began hearings of General Douglas MacArthur.
1952 – The Kentucky Derby was televised nationally for the first time, on CBS.
1952 – Flying US Air Force C-47, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher and Lieutenant Colonel William P. Benedict becme the first to land a plane on the North Pole.
1960 – The Off-Broadway musical comedy The Fantasticks opened in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
1977 – British journalist David Frost interviewed former President Richard Nixon.
1980 – 13-year-old Cari Lightner of Fair Oaks, California, was hit and killed by a drunk driver. Her mother, Candy Lightner, later founded the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)
1986 – 54-year-old Willie Shoemaker, riding 18:1shot Ferdinand, becamethe oldest jockey ever to win the Kentucky Derby
1991- The final episode of Dallas was broadcast on the CBS network; it was resurrected 21 years later on TNT.
2003 – New Hampshire’s famous Old Man of the Mountain collapsed.
2007 – Nearly 4 year old Madeleine McCann of Rothley, England, disappeared during a family vacation at a resort in southern Portugal.
History for May 4
May 4 is Star Wars Day. “May the Fourth be with you.”
1886 – A labor protest in Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois resulted in 100 wounded and 8 police officers killed.
1904 – The United States began construction of the Panama Canal.
1933 – The discovery of radio waves from the center of the Milky Way galaxy was announced by Karl Jansky.
1948 – Norman Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead was published.
1953 – Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.
1970 – Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Allison B. Krause, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer were killed by National Guard troops at Ohio’s Kent state campus.
1972 – The Don’t Make A Wave Committee, an environmental organization founded in Canada in 1971, officially changes its name to the Greenpeace Foundation.
1989 – The space probe Magellan was carried in the cargo bay Space Shuttle Atlantis and released to travel around the planet, Venus.
1990 – Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida after his electric chair malfunctioned three times, causing his hair & head to catch fire.
History for May 5
1809 – Mary Kies became the first woman awarded a US patent (#X01043) , for a technique of weaving straw with silk and thread.
1821 – Corsica-born Napoleon Bonaparte died as a British prisoner on the remote island of Saint Helena in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
1847 – The American Medical Association (AMA) met for the first time in the Hall of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1862 – General Ignacio Zaragoza defeated a French army led by General Charles Latrille de Lorencez that was attempting to capture Puebla de Los Angeles, a small town in east-central Mexico. This was the initial Cinco de Mayo cause for celebration.
1891 – The Music Hall in New York City (now known as Carnegie Hall) has its grand opening and first public performance, with Pyotr Tchaikovsky as the guest conductor.
1904 – Pitching against the Philadelphia Athletics at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, Cy Young of the Boston Americans threw the first perfect game in the modern era of baseball. Theyt named an award after him.
1933 – The discovery of radio waves from the centre of the Milky Way galaxy was announced by Karl Jansky.
1934 – The first Three Stooges short – Woman Haters was released.
1936 – The patent (#2,039,345) was issued for the first bottle with a screw cap and a pour lip to Edward A. Ravenscroft, Glencoe, Illinois
1961 – Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, the first American astronaut to travel into space.
1965 – The Warlocks, later known as The Grateful Dead, made their first public appearance at Magoo’s Pizza located at 639 Santa Cruz Avenue, Menlo Park, California.
1994 – American teenager Michael P. Fay was caned in Singapore for theft and vandalism
2002 – Spider-Man was released and became the fastest movie ever to earn more than $100 million at the box office, raking in $114.8 million that weekend.
History for May 6
1840 (Tornado) Natchez, Mississippi
1851 – Linus Yale, Jr. was granted a ptent (#8,071) for the invention of his “Self-Detaching and Attaching Key-Lock” as “a new and Improved Safety-Lock for Banks, Safes, Vaults, Stores, &c.”
1851 – President Benjamin Harrison had the first electric lights installed in the White House.
1889 – The Eiffel Tower was officially opened to the public at the Universal Exposition in Paris.
1933 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA)
1937 – The Hindenburg exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crewmembers.
1940 – John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath.
1954 – Roger Bannister broke four-minute mile (3:59.4) at the Iffley Road Track in Oxford, England
1956 – Elvis Presley appeared on the Milton Berle Show.
1984 – Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, collectively called Spinal Tap, performed at CBGB’s in NYC.
2001 – During a trip to Syria, Pope John Paul II became the first pope to enter a mosque.
2013 – Michelle Knight, Amada Berry and Gina DeJesus were freed after being held for years in the home of Ariel Castro.
History for May 7
1896 – Dr. H. H. Holmes, one of America’s first well-known serial killers, was hanged to death in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Over 200 bodies were found in his property.
1902 (Volcano) Mount Pelee (Mount Pele), Martinique
1915 – A German U-boat sank the Lusitania.
1952 – The concept of the integrated circuit chip was first presented, at a Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington DC, by Geoffrey W.A. Dummer.
1963 – NASA launched the Telstar 2 communications satellite on behalf of AT&T.
1994 – Norway’s most famous painting The Scream by Edvard Munch (1893), was recovered almost three months after it was stolen from a museum in Oslo.
1998 – Germany’s Daimler-Benz announced the purchase of the Chrysler Corporation, forming DaimlerChrysler AG. It was sold again in 2006, forming Chrysler LLC.
History for May 8
1840 – The first U.S. photographic patent (#1,582) was issued to Alexander S. Wolcott of New York City
1886 – Coca-Cola was first sold to the public at the soda fountain in Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia.
1902 (Tornado) Goliad, Texas
1912 – Paramount Pictures was founded.
1933 – Mohandas Gandhi began a 21-day fast of self-purification and launched a one-year campaign to help the Harijan movement.
1945 – V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day) was celebrated in America and Great Britain.
1961 – The first practical seawater conversion plant in the US was opened in Freeport, Texas.
1963 – Dr No, starring Sean Connery, opened in theaters.
1976 – The New Revolution, the first steel roller coaster with a vertical loop, opened at Six Flags Magic Mountain.
1980 – The World Health Organization confirmed the eradication of smallpox.
1984 – The Soviet Union announced that they were boycotting the 1984 Olympics.
2010 – Betty White hosted Saturday Night Live, thanks to a push by fans on Facebook. She won an Emmy for her appearance.
History for May 9
1662 – Famous puppet Mr. Punch made his first recorded appearance in England.
1865 – The patent (#47,631) was issued to Richard Jordan Gatling for the Gatling gun, which was the first to successfully combine reliability, high firing rate and ease of loading into a single device.
1882 – William F. Ford was issued a patent (#257,487) for his stethoscope.
1887 – Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show opened in London, England.
1893 – The first motion picture exhibition was presented by Thomas Edison in Brooklyn, New York to an audience of 400 people at the Dept of Physics, Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, NY using his Kinetograph.
1914 – Although referred to since the late 1800s, US President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Mother’s Day holiday on this date.
1950 – L. Ron Hubbard (Lafayette Ronald Hubbard) published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
1955 – Harpo Marx appeared on a very special I Love Lucy Episode.
1955 – West Germany joined NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
1958 – Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo has world premiere in San Francisco.
1960 – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the world’s first commercially produced birth-control bill-Enovid-10.
1961 – Newton Minow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, referred to television as the “vast wasteland”
1992 – The Golden Girls aired their series finale.
History for May 10
1860 – The discovery of two new elements – caesium (Cs) and rubidium (Rb), was announced by German chemists, Robert Bunsen and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff to the Berlin Academy of Scientists.
1869 – Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads completed the Transcontinental Railroad.
1877 – US President Rutherford B. Hayes has the White House’s first telephone installed in the ‘telegraph room.’
1879 – America’s first archaeological society was formed in Boston Mass., the Archaeological Institute of America.
1893 – The Supreme Court of the United States rules in Nix v. Hedden that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit, under the Tariff Act of 1883. Scientificaly, it is a fruit.
1924 – J. Edgar Hoover as named acting director of the Bureau of Investigation (now the FBI).
1975 – Sony’s Betamax, the first home videocassette recorder, went on sale in Japan
1980 – The US Government gave Chrysler a $1.5 billion loan.
1994 – Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was sworn in as the first black president of South Africa.
2013 – One World Trade Center became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, at 1,776 feet.
History for May 11
868 – The first known dated printed book was the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist scripture. A citation included : “printed on 11 May 868, by Wang Chieh, for free general distribution”.
1811 – The famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, were born of Chinese parents in Siam (now Thailand).
1942 – Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner, was published
1947 – B.F. Goodrich Co. announced the development of tubeless tire.
1949 – The first Polaroid cameras were sold for $89.95.
1950 – Evelyn and Paul Trent took the McMinnville UFO photographs
1953 (Tornado) Waco, Texas
1980 – Bob Marley died from lung cancer
1996 – Captain Planet and The Planeteer cartoon series came to an end.
1997 – IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov.
History for May 12
1551 – The National University of San Marcos, the oldest university in the Americas, was founded in Lima, Peru.
1932 – The body of the Lindbergh baby was found less than a mile from the Lindbergh home in Hopewell, New Jersey.
1963 – Bob Dylan walked out on The Ed Sullivan Show before his planned appearance over the lyrics to the song he would perform his song Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.
1993- The Wonder Years television series came to an end
1995 – Day time soap opera As The World Turns aired its 10,000th episode
2008 (Earthquake) Sichuan, China
2015 – A train derailment in Philadelphia killed 8 people and injured over 200.
History for May 13
1607 – English in Virginia founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America.
1637 – The rounded table knife was created by Cardinal Richelieu in France.
1890 – Nikola Tesla was issued a patent (#428,057) for an electric generator.
1917 – Three children, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto report the first apparition of Our Lady of Fátima in Fátima, Portugal.
1939 – The first commercial FM radio station in the United States is launched in Bloomfield, Connecticut. The station later became WDRC-FM.
1954 – The original Broadway production of The Pajama Game opened.
1972 – A fire at the Playtown Cabaret nightclub in Osaka, Japan killed 118 people.
1973 – Bobby Riggs beat Margaret Court in a $10,000 winner-take-all challenge tennis match. Billie Jean King played him on September 20, 1973 and won the second Battle of the Sexes.
1981 – Pope John Paul II was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca.
1985 – Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode ordered police to raid the MOVE headquarters, and a small bomb was detonated on top of 6221 Osage Avenue. Six adults and five children were killed in the fire that destroyed the entire block, along with 250 nearby homes.
1994 – Johnny Carson made his last television appearance on Late Show with David Letterman.
History for May 14
1796 – Edward Jenner, a doctor from Gloucestershire, England successfully tested his vaccination for smallpox on eight year old James Phipps.
1804 – Lewis and Clark expedition left St. Louis, Missouri, on a mission to explore the Northwest from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.
1842 – Alfred Lord Tennyson published Poems.
1850 – The first US. patent (#7,365) for a dishwashing machine was issued to Joel Houghton of Ogden, NY, for an “Improvement in Machines for Washing Table Furniture”.
1897 – The Stars and Stripes Forever by John Philip Sousa was first performed in public near Willow Grove Park, Philadelphia.
1925 – Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway was published.
1932 – The first electrical timing device was tested at a track meet between Columbia and Syracuse at Baker Field, NYC.
1948 – In Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel
1955 – The Warsaw Pact was signed between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria in response to the west’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
1973 – Skylab I was launched.
1998 – 76.3 million people tuned in for the series finale of Seinfeld.
1998 – Celebrity Deathmatch premiered on MTV
History for May 15
1501 – Ottaviano Petrucci opened the first modern-style music publishing house, by producing the first book of music made from movable type, in Venice.
1793 – Diego Marín Aguilera flew a glider for approximately 1,000 feet during one of the first attempted manned flights, in Spain.
1800 – President John Adams ordered the new US federal government to leave Philadelphia and move to the nation’s new capital in Washington DC.
1858 – Royal Opera House opened in Covent Garden, London with a performance of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots.
1862 – President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill into law creating the United States Bureau of Agriculture. It was later renamed the United States Department of Agriculture.
1895 – A guesstimated F5 tornado hit Sherman, Texas and killed 73 people.
1891 – Pope Leo XIII defends workers’ rights and property rights in the encyclical Rerum novarum.
1928 – Walt Disney character Mickey Mouse premiered in his first (silent) cartoon, Plane Crazy. 1929’s Steamboat Willie had sound. Plane Crazy was re-released with sound later 1929.
1935 – Albert Einstein was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal for his outstanding fundamental contributions to theoretical physics, especially his relativity theory, at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA.
1940 – Nylon stockings went on sale for the first time in the United States.
1940 – Richard and Maurice McDonald opened their hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, California.
1942 – Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAACs) was formed, granting women official US military status.
1953 – Stanley L. Miller’s paper on the synthesis of amino acids under conditions that simulated primitive Earth’s atmosphere was published in Science. Miller had applied an electric discharge to a mixture of CH4, NH3, H2O, and H2 (which was believed at the time to be the atmospheric composition of early Earth.), creating a mixture of amino acids, hydroxy acids, and urea.
2001 – The final Friends episode aired on NBC, titled ‘The One with Monica and Chandler’s Wedding’.
History for May 16
1866 – Root Beer was invented by Charles Elmer Hires in Philadelphia, PA.
1946 – The first magnetic tape recorder was demonstrated by Jack Mullin.
1964 – Motown Records got its first #1 hit with My Guy by Mary Wells.
1983 – The concert special Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever was broadcast by NBC; Michael Jackson performed his ‘moonwalk’ dance for the first time on television.
1988 – Nicotine was declared to be addictive in ways similar to heroin and cocaine, in a report released by US Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop.
1991 – Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom addressed a joint session of the United States Congress.
1996 – 12 million people tuned in for the series finale of Murder, She Wrote on CBS. The show was the longest running American Murder-Mystery drama.
1998 – Unsolved Mysteries true-crime series ended.
2014 – Broadcast journalist and TV personality Barbara Walters retired from ABC News and from daytime program The View.
History for May 17
1536 – The annulment of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s marriage.
1792 – The New York Stock Exchange was formed.
1875 – Aristides won the first Kentucky Derby.
1890 – Comic Cuts, the first British weekly comic paper, was published in London by Alfred Northcliffe.
1954 – The US Supreme Court handed down an unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling that racial segregation in public educational facilities was unconstitutional.
1955 – Nathan Kline, appeared before the U.S. Congress to explain his work with Reserpine, an early antihypertensive/ antipsychotic psychopharmacology drug.
1965 – Written in 1955, the FBI Laboratory, after a formal investigation that began in 1964, declared the lyrics of Louie Louie to be officially ‘Unintelligible at any speed.’
1970 – Thor Heyerdahl and a multinational crew set out from Morocco across the Atlantic Ocean in Ra II in 57 days.
2000 – The final episode of Beverly Hills 90210 aired on FOX.
2004 – The first legal same-sex marriages in the US were performed in the state of Massachusetts.
History for May 18
1910 – The Earth passes through the tail of Halley’s Comet.
1926 – In one of the first Media Frenzy’s of Popular Culture, Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappeared while visiting a Venice, California beach.
1946 – A UFO, with living creatures inside, was reported by Gosta Carlsson, in Sweden.
1952 – Professor Willard F. Libby determined the age of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, England, at 1848 BC, give or take 275 years.
1958 – Team Lotus made its Formula One debut in the Monaco Grand Prix.
1980 (Volcano Eruption) Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted with a 5.1 magnitude, causing a massive avalanche and killed 57 people.
1980 – Ian Curtis of post-punk band Joy Division committed suicide. The remaining members went on to form New Order.
1998 – Murphy Brown TV series ended on CBS.
2001 – Based on William Steig’s 1990 children’s book, Shrek was released in movie theaters.
History for May 19
1780 – This morning, a combination of thick smoke and heavy cloud cover caused complete darkness to fall on Eastern Canada and the New England area of the United States candles were needed by noon, and it not disburse until the following evening, causing New England’s Dark Day.
1910 – Earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet.
1962 – Marilyn Monroe sang her famous Happy Birthday to President John F. Kennedy at NYC’s Madison Square Garden
1965 – Pete Townshend wrote My Generation today, his 20th birthday on a train. He was on a train because his car, a 1935 Packard hearse, was ordered away by the Queen.
1987 – A patent (#4,666,425) for “keeping a head alive” was issued to Chet Fleming.
1994 – In Living Color (FOX) and L.A. Law (NBC) came to an end
1996 – Sundance Channel made its debut.
1997 – Avian flu, A(H5N1), killed a three-year-old boy in Hong Kong, its first victim.
2006 – The Da Vinci Code opened in theaters.
2009 – Glee premiered on FOX
History for May 20
1873 – Levi Strauss and Jacob W Davis patented (#139,121) copper-riveted jeans, designed to help prevent tears in the fabric.
1883 – Krakatoa began to erupt; the volcano exploding three months later, killing more than 36,000 people.
1899 – The American Physical Society was founded at Columbia University.
1901 – Claude Grivolas patented (French) a projector for three-dimensional (stereoscopic) movies viewed wearing spectacles with one red and one blue lens.
1916 – The Saturday Evening Post published its first cover with a Norman Rockwell painting – ‘Boy with Baby Carriage’.
1927 – US aviator Charles A. Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, on the world’s first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean (New York to Paris.)
1949 – The Armed Forces Security Agency, the predecessor to the National Security Agency (NSA), was established.
1957 – Pilot Milton Torres was ordered to intercept a UFO over East Anglia, UK
1983 – First publication of the discovery of the HIV virus that causes AIDS in the journal Science by Luc Montagnier.
1993 – 80 million people watched the series finale of Cheers on NBC
1994- The Joan Rivers Show (FOX) came to an end
1995 – Star Search (syndicated) came to an end.
1995 – Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the White House, was closed to traffic
1996 – NBC’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air series came to an end
1997 – Roseanne series came to an end on ABC
2003 – America’s Next Top Model premiered on UPN
History for May 21
1863 – Organization of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Battle Creek, Michigan.
1955 – George B. Hansburg of Walker Valley, N.Y. was issued a patent (#2,793,036) for his invention of an improved pogo stick.
1975 – Carol Burnett was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
1980 – Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was released in theaters. At the time, we just called it The Empire Strikes Back.
1980 – President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York – a toxic dumping site for Hooker Chemicals and Plastics.
1992- The first episode of The Real World aired on MTV
1992- The final episode of MacGyver aired on ABC
1992 – Johnny Carson hosted The Tonight Show for the last time.
1999- All My Children actress Susan Lucci finally received an Emmy award for her role as Erica Kane. She had been previously nominated a record 18 times with no win.
2005 – The tallest roller coaster in the world, Kingda Ka opened at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, New Jersey.
2008 – David Cook won American Idol season seven.
2001 – Radio broadcaster/preacher Harold Camping predicted that the world would end today. It didn’t.
History for May 22
1455 – England’s War of the Roses began when the Yorkists defeated King Henry VI’s Lancastrian forces at St. Albans.
1849 – Abraham Lincoln was issued a patent (#6,469) for “buoying boats over shoals”.
1906 – Orville and Wilbur Wright were granted a patent (#821,393) for their system of flight control.
1927 (Earthquake) Gulang/Gansu, China
1960 (Earthquake) Magnitude 9.5 in Chile killed 5,000 and left 2,000,000 homeless.
1992 – Johnny Carson hosted The Tonight Show for the last time
1993- NBC broadcasted the graduation episode (series finale) for Saved By The Bell.
1995- Blossom came to an end on NBC
2011 (Tornado) Joplin, Missouri
History for May 23
1911 – The New York Public Library was dedicated.
1934 – Bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde were shot to death in stolen Ford Deluxe near Bienville Parish, Louisiana.
1960 (Tsunami) Caused by yesterday’s earthquake off the coast of Chile, a tsunami travelled across the Pacific Ocean and killed 61 people in Hilo, Hawaii.
1994 – Star Trek: The Next Generation aired its final episode titled “All Good Things”. It aired at 6pm rather than being part of the prime-time line-up
1995 – ABC’s Full House came to an end
2005 – Tom Cruise famously jumped around on Oprah Winfrey’s couch, proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes
2007 – Jordin Sparks won America Idol season six
2012 – Phillip Phillips won American Idol season eleven
History for May 24
1775 – John Hancock was elected president of the Second Continental Congress.
1830 – Mary Had a Little Lamb by Sarah Josepha Hale was published.
1844 – Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first public telegraph message – ‘What Hath God Wrought?’ through the Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph line.
1883 – The Brooklyn Bridge over the East River opened, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn.
1935 – The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1 in Major League Baseball’s first-ever night game at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, Ohio.
1938 – A patent (#2,118,318) was issued for a Coin Controlled Parking Meter to Carl C. McGee of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
1943 – Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’ began working at the Auschwitz, Poland concentration camp.
1976 – The Concorde began regular passenger service between Europe and Washington DC.
1991 – Thelma and Louise, starring Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, was released. Their car was a 1966 Ford Thunderbird.
1995 – ABC made the announcement that an episode of All My Children was deleted from broadcast due to the recent Oklahoma City bombing. In the storyline a character was supposed to explode a church in which her ex was re-marrying.
2006 – Taylor Hicks won American Idol season five
History for May 25
1878 – Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore opened at the Opera Comique in London.
1935 – At Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Babe Ruth hit his 714th (and final) home run.
1961 – President John F. Kennedy declared “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. No single space program in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
1968 – The Saint Louis Gateway Arch was dedicated.
1977 – Star Wars opened Memorial Day weekend, marking the biggest entertainment juggernaut in modern popular culture.
1977 – Chinese government removed the ban on the works of William Shakespeare, the biggest entertainment juggernaut in the Elizabethan era.
1986 – Hands Across America takes place.
1992 – Jay Leno made his debut as the new host of The Tonight Show.
1994 – George Swanson was buried in Brush Creek Cemetery, in the driver’s seat of his 1984 white Corvette in Hempfield County, Pennsylvania.
1996 – Sublime singer/guitarist Bradley Nowel died from a heroin overdose. He was not 27
2005 – Carrie Underwood won season four of America Idol on FOX.
2011- Oprah Winfrey hosted the final episode of her syndicated daytime show.
History for May 26
1293 (Eartquake) Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan, killing about 30,000.
1869 – Boston University was chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
1896 – Charles Dow published the first edition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
1897 – Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel began being sold in the UK.
1917 (Tornadoes) Matoon and Charlestown Illinois
1923 – The first 24 Hours of Le Mans was held and has since been run annually every June.
1977 – George Willig illegally climbed the South Tower of New York City’s World Trade Center.
1990 – The final episode of The Tracey Ullman Show aired on FOX
1998 – The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Ellis Island, the historic gateway for millions of immigrants, is mainly in the state of New Jersey, not New York.
2012 – Planet Green became Destination America on cable television
History for May 27
1199 – John (December 24, 1166 – October 19, 1216) became King of England. He’s the one who signed The Magna Carta, which was the first document to offer people individual rights.
1796 – The patent (#X0116) for a piano was issued to James Sylvanus McLean of New Jersey, for “an improvement in piano fortes.”
1890 – Two U.S. patents (#428,750,#428,751) for the first jukebox were issued to Louis Glass and his business associate, William S. Arnold for a “coin actuated attachment for phonographs.”
1896 (Tornado) St. Louis and East St. Louis, Missouri.
1919 – Pyrex glass was issued a patent (#1,304,623). The inventors, Eugene C. Sullivan and William C. Taylor for Corning Glass Works.
1930 – Masking Tape was patented (#1,760,820) by Richard G. Drew of St. Paul, Minnesota for his employers, 3M.
1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took man’s first trip (in a pressurized cabin) into the stratosphere when they rode their balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.
1933 – The Century of Progress World’s Fair opened in Chicago.
1937 – The Golden Gate Bridge, connecting San Francisco with Marin County, California opened. Today was “Pedestrian Day” – cars were allowed the following day.
1941 – The British navy sank the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France, killing over 2,000 Germans.
1963 – Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was released.
1983 – Benton Fireworks Disaster, Tennessee
1986 – Dragon Quest, the first major role-playing video game, was released in Japan.
1994- The Arsenio Hall Show came to an end on FOX
1994 – The National League and American League Baseball M.V.P.s were Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas, respectively. Jeff and Frank were both born on the exact same day: May 27, 1968.
History for May 28
585 BC – A solar eclipse occurred, as predicted by the Greek philosopher and scientist Thales. Knowing this exact date helped historians find other exact and near exact historical dates.
1830 – US President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act which relocated Native Americans.
1892 – In San Francisco, California, John Muir organized the Sierra Club.
1897 – Jell-o was introduced.
1902 – Owen Wister’s The Virginian was published by Macmillan Press. The book made the American Cowboy an icon.
1928 – The Dodge Brothers, Inc. and the Chrysler Corporation merged.
1935 – John Steinbeck’s first successful novel, Tortilla Flat, was published.
1937 – Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH, later renamed Volkswagenwerk, or Volkswagon was founded.
1937 – The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco was officially opened to vehicles
1964 – The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed.
1987 – Matthias Rust, a 19-year-old amateur pilot from West Germany, took off from Helsinki, Finland, in his Cessna, and landed in Red Square, the heart of the Soviet Union.
1998 – Former Saturday Night Live actor and comedian Phil Hartman was shot and killed by his wife Brynn, in a murder/suicide.
1999 – In Milan, Italy, after 22 years of restoration work, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper was put back on display. It is beggir than most people think – it is life-size, almost 29 feet wide.
History for May 29
1453 – Ottoman armies under Sultan Mehmed II Fatih captured Constantinople after a 53-day siege, commonly referred to as The Fall of Constantinople.
1790 – Rhode Island was the last of the original United States’ colonies to ratify the Constitution and was admitted as the 13th US state.
1913 – Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris, France
1914 – Heavy fog caused a collision between cruise ship Empress of Ireland and coal freighter, the Storstad on the St. Lawrence River in Canada that killed 1,073 people, mostly tourist passengers on the Empress.
1953 – Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, became the first explorers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which is at 29,035 feet above sea level.
1954 – First of the annual Bilderberg Group conferences was held in the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.
1979 – Actor Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, was charged with the murder of Judge John Wood.
1982 – Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to visit Canterbury Cathedral.
2004 – The National World War II Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C.
History for May 30
1431 – At Rouen, Normandy, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy.
1631 – Gazette de France, the first French newspaper, began publication.
1806 – Future US President Andrew Jackson participated in a duel, killing Charles Dickinson. Dickinson shot first, wounding Jackson, but Jackson’s shot at Dickinson was fatal. Most of Andrew Jackson’s duels were for the questioned honor of his wife, Rachel.
1898 – Chemist Morris William Travers discovered the element krypton (Kr), the element, not the planet.
1911 – The inaugural Indianapolis 500 was run at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indiana.
1922 – The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in Washington DC.
1966 – Launch of Surveyor 1, the first US spacecraft to land on an extraterrestrial body (the Moon).
2005 – American student Natalee Holloway disappeared while on a high school graduation trip to Aruba. Most people believe that Joran van der Sloot had something to do with it.
2008 – The film version of HBO’s comedy series Sex and the City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker was released.
History for May 31
1279 BC – Ramesses II became pharaoh of Ancient Egypt. He may have been the pharaoh involved with Moses. He was the subject of Percy Bysshe Shelly’s Ozymandias. “King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”
1578 – The Catacombs of Rome were discovered.
1790 – The United States enacted the Copyright Act of 1790.
1859 – Big Ben, located at the top of London’s 320-foot-high St. Stephen’s Tower, began operating.
1889 – Johnston, Pennsylvania Flood killed over 2,200 people.
1927 – The last Ford Model T rolls off the assembly line after a production run of 15,007,003 vehicles. Henry took the last one home, to be with the first one and the prototype.
1935 (Earthquake) British India (Pakistan)
1970 (Earthquake) Yungay, Peru
1977 – The Sex Pistol’s God Save The Queen was banned from performing on the BBC.
1997 – Singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley drowned while swimming in his pool. He was not 27.
2000 – Survivor premiered on CBS
2005 – W. Mark Felt’s family announced that assistant FBI director Felt, was in fact, ‘Deep Throat’ – the insider who told reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein the details about President Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
2006 – The Hills premiered on MTV
