Monday, June 1:

1533: Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was crowned Queen of England. She reigned for three years before she was executed by beheading for treason.

1962: Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel.

1980: Cable News Network, aka CNN, began broadcasting.

Sunday, May 31:

1859: In the clock tower that is part of England’s Houses of Parliament, the hands of Big Ben began keeping time for London.

1889: In southwestern Pennsylvania, the South Fork Dam failed, sending 20million tons of water rushing into Johnstown and killing more than 2,200 people.

1921: A white mob began the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma, attacking the Greenwood District, also known as 'Black Wall Street.' An estimated 100-300 Black people were killed as the mob looted and burned Black-owned businesses and homes, leaving thousands displaced.

1955: Just over a year after deciding Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision known as Brown II, pressing school districts to implement desegregation plans 'with all deliberate speed.'

1977: The BBC banned the controversial song 'God Save the Queen' by punk band the Sex Pistols. Despite the ban and some stores refusing to sell the single, the song resonated with enough people who bought it where they could find it, propelling it to No. 2 on the UK pop charts.

2000: The first episode of the TV show 'Survivor' aired on CBS.

2005: Former FBI assistant director W. Mark Felt revealed in a Vanity Fair article that he was the informant known as Deep Throat who passed information about the 1972 Watergate break-in and scandal to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

2024: Donald Trump became the first sitting or former president to be convicted of a felony when a New York jury found him guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments made to a porn star.

Saturday, May 30:

1431: Convicted of heresy, Joan of Arc was executed by burning at the stake. The young military leader who claimed to receive divine visions was honored as a saint in 1920.

1868: Decoration Day was first observed as a national holiday, honoring those who had died in military service during the Civil War, often by decorating their graves with flowers. The holiday later became Memorial Day, extended to honor all who died in military service and was observed May 30 each year through 1970, after which it has fallen on the last Monday in May.

1942: Japanese American Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to be placed in an internment camp. He was convicted and given five years of probation, a verdict upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court based on 'military necessity' for the detentions. In 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned by a federal judge when presented with official reports previously withheld from the courts, showing there was no military necessity and Japanese Americans presented no threat during World War II.

2024: A New York jury found then-presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records during his first term. The verdict made Trump the first former president to be convicted of a crime, and his election victory later in the year made him the first person with a criminal conviction to be elected president. However, a July 2024 Supreme Court ruling established broad immunity for a president’s actions taken while in office, and in January 2025 Trump was sentenced to unconditional discharge.

Friday, May 29:

1453: The Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), the capital of the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire.

1851: Speaking at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, abolitionist and former enslaved person Sojourner Truth delivered her famous speech, 'Ain’t I a Woman?' Truth laid out the disparity in treatment of Black women and White women in America, carrying the discussion of rights to the intersection of race and gender.

1953: Sir Edmund Hillary and sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, with an elevation over 29,000 feet.

2015: One World Trade Center’s observatory opened to the public, its three-story vantage offering views of the Statue of Liberty, the New York skyline and beyond from high in the 1,776-foot building.

Thursday, 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. Thousands died during relocation, most famously many Cherokees, on the Trail of Tears.

1892: The Sierra Club was founded in San Francisco by John Muir.

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. The incident spurred debate over keeping primates in captivity and discussion about the child’s parents’ accountability.

Wednesday, 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.

Tuesday, May 26:

1637: During the Pequot War, a conflict between Connecticut colonists and the Pequot tribe, Capt. John Mason’s forces attacked a Pequot settlement near the Mystic River and massacred the village. The low end of estimated Pequot deaths ranges from 400-500 people, including women and children.

1897: Bram Stoker’s 'Dracula' was published in London. While not the first story to depict vampires, 'Dracula' and its titular antagonist went on to permeate popular culture.

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.

Monday, May 25:

1660: England’s King Charles II returned from exile with an invitation from Parliament to restore the monarchy. Charles I had been executed in 1649, and England, Ireland and Scotland had been operating under a Lord Protector since 1653.

1787: The Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia with delegates from states meeting in what is now Independence Hall. They decided against simply amending the Articles of Confederation, opting to work through the coming months on what became the Constitution, signed in September 1787.

1961: President John F. 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.

2020: With a police officer kneeling on his neck and back for more than nine minutes, George Floyd died in Minneapolis, spurring widespread protests with demonstrators declaring, 'Black lives matter.' The White officer, Derek Chauvin, was convicted the following year of murdering Floyd and sentenced to 221/2 years in prison. Later that year, he pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges and was sentenced to 21 years in prison, with his two sentences to be served concurrently.

Sunday, May 24:

1844: Samuel Morse sent a message – 'What hath God wrought?' – from Washington, DC, 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.

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 the gunman, but the responding agencies received intense criticism for a flawed and delayed intervention.

Saturday, May 23:

1701: Having been tried and convicted, William Kidd was hanged as a pirate in London. Kidd had been commissioned to protect English vessels against pirates and the French, but after taking an Indian ship with an English captain in 1698, he was accused of piracy.

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.

1951: The 17-Point Agreement was signed, in which China annexed Tibet. Tibetan officials later claimed the agreement was signed under pressure from the Chinese government, and they denied its validity.

1962: A 12-year-old boy had his arm reattached by surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the first successful reattachment of a severed limb. The boy eventually regained some strength in his arm and grip.

Friday, May 22:

1455: The First Battle of St. Albans marked the start of the Wars of the Roses in England. The forces of Richard, Duke of York, beat back the royal army and captured King Henry VI.

1960: The most powerful earthquake recorded struck Chile with an estimated magnitude of 9.4-9.6. Estimates vary but experts generally agree that the earthquake and tsunamis killed more than 1,000 people in Chile and that the main tsunami killed more than 60 in Hawaii and more than 100 in Japan.

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.

Thursday, May 21:

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.

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.

1992: The first episode of 'The Real World' reality TV show aired on MTV.

1999: After being nominated for an Emmy 18 times and not winning, Susan Lucci won the Emmy for Best Actress for her role as Erica Kane on the soap opera 'All My Children.'

Wednesday, May 20:

1609: William Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published in London.

1873: Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received a patent for using metal rivets at strategic points to strengthen work pants.

1916: The Saturday Evening Post published its first Norman Rockwell cover illustration.

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.

1983: The first research into what later became known as HIV – the underlying cause of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS – was published in the journal Science.

1996: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Romer v. Evans against a Colorado state constitutional amendment that would have prevented cities or counties from recognizing gay or bisexual people as a protected class.

Tuesday, May 19:

1536: The second wife of Britain’s King Henry VIII, 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.

1975: In reaction to the police beating of Peter Yew the previous month, thousands of residents and workers in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood protested violence at the hands of police, shutting down many of the neighborhood’s businesses and marching to City Hall.

Monday, May 18:

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. The ruling was overturned by the court 58 years later.

1917: 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 ash across 11 states.

2012: Facebook became a publicly traded company, its initial public offering setting a record with more than 460 million shares traded in its debut. The IPO raised $16 billion for Facebook.

Sunday, May 17:

1792: The Buttonwood Agreement organized the trading of securities in New York City and formed the New York Stock Exchange.

1900: 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' by L. Frank Baum was published. The first edition of 10,000 copies sold out quickly.

1954: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that state laws segregating schools were unconstitutional.

1974: 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.

Saturday, May 16:

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.

1975: Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei became the first woman to summit Mount Everest.

1985: Three British Scientists – Joseph Farman, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin – announced in the scientific journal Nature that they had discovered a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.

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.

Friday, May 15:

1765: Among the decisions that caused friction between Britain and its American colonies, the Quartering Act received formal approval from King George III, requiring colonial authorities to house British soldiers if the barracks provided there were too small. The law helped spur the Third Amendment of the Constitution, which specifically protects against it.

1800: President John Adams ordered the federal government to move from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, and have offices up and running by June 15. Philadelphia officially relinquished the title of 'nation’s capital' on June 11.

1940: The first McDonald’s restaurant was opened in San Bernardino, California, by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald.

Thursday, 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.

1796: Convinced by anecdotes of farmworkers who had contracted cowpox and not smallpox, Edward Jenner hypothesized the cowpox protected them. He tested the first vaccination process for smallpox by scraping material from a cowpox blister onto an 8-year-old boy’s hand, then following with an application on July 1 of smallpox material. No disease developed. The term vaccine was soon after adopted for inoculations, derived from a Latin term for cow.

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.

1969: The House of Commons of Canada passed an omnibus bill that decriminalized homosexual acts among consenting adults and allowed abortions in some circumstances.

1998: The last episode of 'Seinfeld' aired.

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. He initially livestreamed the attack on the social media platform Twitch, but the company ended the broadcast.

Tuesday, May 12:

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.

1965: The uncrewed Soviet spacecraft Luna 5 crashed into the moon. It was intended to become the first craft to successfully navigate a soft landing, but a problem with a gyroscope caused the craft to lose control.

1968: Protesters began arriving in Washington, DC, as part of the Poor People’s Campaign developed by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. King was assassinated a month before the event, but people came by the thousands to advocate for America’s poor. The demonstration lasted six weeks, with some participants setting up a shantytown known as Resurrection City.

2022: Officials said the number of U.S. deaths due to COVID-19 reached 1 million.

Monday, May 11:

868: The earliest known dated and printed book, a copy of the Buddhist text 'Diamond Sutra,' was published.

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.

Sunday, 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.

1775 : During the Revolutionary War, Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold led the Green Mountain Boys in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga from the British.

1865: Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured by Union troops near Irwinville, Georgia.

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.

1940: Winston Churchill became prime minister of the United Kingdom after the resignation of Neville Chamberlain.

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.

Saturday, May 9:

1914: President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the second Sunday in May to be Mother’s Day.

1960: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first commercial birth control pill, Enovid.

2012: President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to endorse same-sex marriage.

Friday, 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.

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.

1999: Nancy Mace became the first woman to graduate from The Citadel military college. She now represents South Carolina in the House of Representatives.

2010: Betty White, 88 at the time, became the oldest person to host 'Saturday Night Live.' White later won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her appearance.

2025: The Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals elected Robert Francis Prevost as the successor to Pope Francis, who had died April 21. Prevost took the name Pope Leo XIV: He was the first Augustinian pope and the first to be born in the United States, hailing from Chicago.

Thursday, May 7:

1824: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony debuted in Vienna. 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.

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.

2000: Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as Russia’s president.