This day in history.....

May 8th


1429: During the Hundred Years' War, the siege of Orléans ends when French troops led by 17-year-old Joan of Arc drive the English from the city.


1794: Antoine Lavoisier, French scientist who is considered the founder of modern chemistry, is guillotined by the revolutionary authorities in Paris, France.


1886: Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton invents a beverage he names Coca-Cola.

1945: V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day) officially goes into effect on the day after Germany surrendered unconditionally to Allied forces.


1967: World heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali is indicted for refusing to be inducted into the U.S. Army for religious reasons.


1973: Ending a 71-day siege, armed supporters of the American Indian Movement surrender to federal officials at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
 
May 9th


1671: Irish adventurer Thomas Blood, known as Colonel Blood, is caught after stealing the crown jewels from the Tower of London; he is ultimately pardoned by King Charles II.


1926: American aviators Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett allegedly become the first to fly over the North Pole; evidence later indicates that they may not have reached the pole.


1974: The U.S. House Judiciary Committee begins hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal.
 
May 10th


1863: Confederate General Stonewall Jackson dies eight days after he is accidentally shot by his own troops during the American Civil War


1869: A golden spike is driven into the ground in Promontory, Utah, where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads meet; it marks the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.


1940: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigns; at the request of King George VI, Winston Churchill agrees to take over as prime minister.


1941: Nazi deputy Rudolf Hess, apparently seeking a peace deal between Germany and Britain, steals a plane and crash lands in Scotland; he is arrested and imprisoned for the rest of the war.


1994: Nelson Mandela is sworn in as the first native African president of South Africa; a new, multi-racial cabinet is formed the following day.
 
May11th


1858: Minnesota becomes the 32nd state in the Union.


1949: Siam, in southeast Asia, changes its name to Thailand.


1981: Jamaican born reggae singer Bob Marley dies of cancer.


1997: IBM computer Deep Blue beats chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game series; it is the first time a computer beats an international grand master in a multigame match.


330: Constantinople becomes the new capital of the Roman Empire.
 
May 11th


1870: Manitoba becomes a province of the Dominion of Canada.


1932: Over two months after he was kidnapped, American aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby is found dead; Lindbergh had paid the ransom on April 2.


1949: Soviet troops end their 11-month land blockade of Berlin, Germany; the blockade was deemed useless since Western powers airlifted food and supplies to the city.


1978: The U.S. Department of Commerce declares that hurricanes will no longer be named exclusively after women.
 
May 12th


2007: A good Man and a good Father passed away. MY Dad.
Peter P. Garcynski 10/5/1931--5/12/2007


I Love You and I will miss you Dad!
 
May 13th


1796: British physician Edward Jenner tests the first smallpox vaccine on an eight-year-old boy.


1904: The United States hosts its first Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri.


1948: When British rule over Palestine ends, Israel is proclaimed an independent state and is declared open to Jewish immigration.


1955: The Warsaw Pact is signed by seven European communist nations including the Soviet Union, creating a military alliance in opposition to NATO.


1973: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launches Skylab, the first American space station.
 
Mare said:
May 12th


2007: A good Man and a good Father passed away. MY Dad.
Peter P. Garcynski 10/5/1931--5/12/2007


I Love You and I will miss you Dad!
Click to expand...


This was taken a couple months ago at the V.A. Nursing facility. He was not doing well, but he tried for us girls here in florida with him.
 
MAY 14TH


1567: Mary, Queen of Scots, marries her third husband James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who was acquitted of complicity in her former husband's murder.
Learn more about Mary, Queen of Scots.

1930: United Airlines introduces the first stewardesses on a flight from San Francisco, California to Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Learn more about the Air Transport Industry.

1940: Nylon stockings go on sale for the first time in the United States.


1941: Baseball player Joe DiMaggio begins a 56-game hitting streak.


1957: Great Britain drops a hydrogen bomb on Christmas Island in the Pacific, becoming the third nation, after the United States and the Soviet Union, with thermonuclear capabilities.


1988: The Soviet Union begins withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan nearly a decade after invading the country.
 
May 17th


1792: A group of brokers meeting at a coffee house in New York City organize the New York Stock Exchange. The first transactions are made under a tree on Wall Street.


1875: The first Kentucky Derby is held at Churchill Downs, Kentucky; racehorse Aristides is the winner.


1954: The U.S. Supreme Court reverses an 1896 ruling that education should be "separate but equal," ruling that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional.


1973: The U.S. Senate committee investigating Watergate begins its televised proceedings; allegations of wrongdoing in the affair lead to President Richard Nixon's resignation.
 
May 19th


1536: Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII of England, is beheaded in the Tower of London after she was convicted of adultery.


1643: Representatives from four New England colonies meet in Boston to form a military alliance.


1900: The Tonga Islands are made a British protectorate; they become an independent nation in 1970.


1935: T. E. Lawrence, the British soldier and adventurer known as Lawrence of Arabia, dies in England from a motorcycle accident.


1967: The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States ratify a treaty banning nuclear weapons in space.
 
May 20th


1506: Christopher Columbus dies in poverty in Spain.


1861: North Carolina votes to secede from the Union and join the Confederate States of America.


1927: U.S. aviator Charles Lindbergh takes off from New York in his single-engine aircraft Spirit of St. Louis heading to Paris, France; it is the first nonstop solo transatlantic flight.


1969: U.S. and South Vietnamese troops capture Hamburger Hill after one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.


1980: In a referendum, the largely French-speaking province of Québec votes to remain part of Canada.
 
May 21st


1881: Clara Barton establishes the American Red Cross, a counterpart to the European humanitarian agency founded in Switzerland in 1864.


1932: Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, when she arrives in Ireland from Newfoundland, Canada.


1945: American movie star Humphrey Bogart marries his To Have and Have Not costar Lauren Bacall.


1961: U.S. president John F. Kennedy commits the country to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before this decade is out.”


1991: Rajiv Ghandhi, former prime minister of India, is assassinated during election campaigns; his mother, Prime Minister Indira Ghandhi, was assassinated in 1984.
 
May 22nd



1455: England's 30-year Wars of the Roses begin with King Henry VI's Lancastrian forces defeated by the Yorkists in the Battle of St. Albans.


1939: German dictator Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sign the "Pact of Steel," establishing a military alliance between their countries.


1972: Richard Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to visit the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).


1992: Johnny Carson ends his 30-year reign as the popular host of television's "The Tonight Show."


2003: Golfer Annika Sörenstam tees up for the Colonial tournament, becoming the first woman to compete in a PGA Tour event since Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1945.
 
May 23rd


1785: In a letter, Benjamin Franklin describes his latest invention, bifocal eyeglasses; the upper portion of the lens is ground for distance and the lower part for reading.


1873: The North-West Mounted Police (now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) is established as Canada's national police force; officers are popularly called Mounties.


1911: The administrative center of the New York Public Library opens on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets in Manhattan.


1934: Notorious partners-in-crime Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, commonly known as Bonnie and Clyde, are shot to death in a police ambush in Louisiana.
 
MAY 24TH


1844: The first telegraph message is sent from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland by its inventor Samuel Morse; he telegraphs, "What hath God wrought!".


1883: The Brooklyn Bridge, linking the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan, is opened to traffic; at the time, it is the longest suspension bridge in the world.


1935: The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies in the first major league baseball game to be played at night under the floodlights.

1976: Britain and France begin transatlantic flight service on the Concorde to Washington, D.C. in the United States; the flight takes less than four hours.
 
May 25th


1787: The Constitutional Convention, presided over by George Washington, opens in Philadelphia to establish a new U.S. Constitution.


1793: In Baltimore, Maryland Father Stephen Theodore Badin is the first Roman Catholic priest ordained in the United States.


1935: American track-and-field athlete Jesse Owens breaks or ties six world records in less than an hour at the Big Ten Championship in Ann Arbor, Michigan.


1963: The Organization of African Unity is founded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with the goal of promoting continental peace and cooperation.


1977: The science fiction film Star Wars, directed by George Lucas, is released.
 
May 26th


1521: The Edict of Worms outlaws the German church reformer Martin Luther and his followers, called Lutherans, by imposing on them the Ban of the Holy Roman Empire.


1868: The impeachment trial of U.S. President Andrew Johnson ends; the Senate falls one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors.


1896: The Wall Street Journal begins publishing the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

1948: The all-white National Party, under Daniel Malan, wins South Africa's general elections; the party immediately begins instituting its policy of apartheid, or racial segregation.


1972: Richard Nixon, the first U.S. president to visit the Soviet Union, signs a treaty limiting antiballistic missile sites.


1998: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that most of Ellis Island, former gateway for immigrants to America and now a museum, belongs to New Jersey, not New York.
 
May 27th


1647: The first recorded execution of a witch in America takes place in Massachusetts.


1937: The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, opens; at the time of its completion, it is the longest suspension bridge in existence.


1994: Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returns to live in his native Russia after 20 years in exile.


1996: Russian President Boris Yeltsin signs a truce with Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, leader of the breakaway state of Chechnya, although fighting continues on both sides.
 
May 28th


1929: On With the Show, the first talking movie that is all in color debuts at New York City's Winter Garden theater.


1934: The identical Dionne quintuplets are born in Ontario, Canada; the girls are made wards of the government and put on display at a themepark called Quintland.

1980: The first Islamic parliament, the Majlis, opens in Iran.


1987: West German Mathias Rust flies a private plane unchallenged through Soviet airspace and lands in Moscow's historic Red Square.


1991: The 17-year Marxist rule which brought famine and war to Ethiopia ends when rebel tanks storm the nation's capital, Addis Ababa.
 
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