1111 – After months of controversy Pope Paschal II crowns Henry V, the King of Germany and Italy, as the Holy Roman Emperor
1250 – The Seventh Crusade is defeated in Egypt, Louis IX of France captured
1556 – Portuguese Marranos who revert back to Judaism burned by order of Pope
1598 – King Henry IV of France signed the Edict of Nantes which granted political rights to French Protestant Huguenots.
1775 – Lord North extended the New England Restraining Act to South, Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. The act prohibited trade with any country other than Britain and Ireland.
1796 – The first known elephant to arrive in the United States from Bengal, India.
1829 – The English Parliament granted freedom of religion to Catholics.
1860 – The first mail was delivered via Pony Express when a westbound rider arrived in Sacremento, CA from St. Joseph, MO.
1861 – After 34 hours of bombardment, the Union-held Fort Sumter surrenders to Confederates.
1868 – Abyssinian War ends as British and Indian troops capture Magdala and Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros II commits suicide
1873 – Colfax Massacre in Grant Parish, Louisiana (60 blacks killed)
1911 – The US House of Representatives votes to institute direct elections of senators to Congress, a step towards direct democracy
1919 – British troops massacre around 400 unarmed civilians in India – Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his men to shoot into the crowd, in his own words “to punish the Indians for disobedience.” The Indian independence movement grew considerably after the Amritsar massacre.
1934 – 4.7 million US families report receiving welfare payments
1943 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial.
1943 – Nazis discover mass grave of Polish officers near Katyn
1944 – Transport #71 departs Drancy (France) internment camp, taking 1,500 French Jews to Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi German occupied Poland; an estimated 91 survived
1948 – Hadassah Convoy Massacre: Vehicles bringing Jewish staff and medical supplies to Hadassah Hospital and University on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem attacked by Arab forces; 79 killed by bombs, grenades, and sniper fire
1959 – A Vatican edict prohibited Roman Catholics from voting for Communists.
1962 – In the U.S., major steel companies rescinded announced price increases. The John F. Kennedy administration had been applying pressure against the price increases.
1970 – Mikis Theodorakis is freed – The Greek composer and politician was interned in the concentration camp of Oropos by the right-wing military junta. The solidarity movement demanding his release included Dmitri Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, and Harry Belafonte.
1970 – An oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13, preventing a planned moon landing.
1972 – The first strike in the history of major league baseball ended. Players had walked off the field 13 days earlier
1975 – Christian Falange kills 27 Palestinians, begins Lebanese civil war
1981 – Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke received a Pulitzer Prize for her feature about an 8-year-old heroin addict named “Jimmy.” Cooke relinquished the prize two days later after admitting she had fabricated the story. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1996/05/09/janet-cookes-untold-story/23151d68-3abd-449a-a053-d72793939d85/
1984 – U.S. President Reagan sent emergency military aid to El Salvador without congressional approval.
1984 – Christopher Walker was killed in a fight with police in New Hampshire. Walker was wanted as a suspect in the kidnappings of 11 young women in several states.
1990 – The Soviet Union accepted responsibility for the World War II murders of thousands of imprisoned Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. The Soviets had previously blamed the massacre on the Nazis.
1994 – Presidential guard at Kigali, Rwanda, chops 1,200 church members to death
1999 – Jack Kervorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, MI, to 10 to 25 years in prison for the second-degree murder of Thomas Youk. Youk’s assisted suicide was videotaped and shown on “60 Minutes” in 1998.
2002 – Twenty-five Hindus were killed and about 30 were wounded when grenades were thrown by suspected Islamic guerrillas near Jammu-Kashir.
2012 – North Korean long range rocket testing ends in failure after the rocket broke up after launch
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
