1970 – The Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on students during an anti-Vietnam war protest at Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine others were wounded.
1256 – Augustinian monastic order constituted at Lecceto Monastery when Pope Alexander IV issues a papal bull Licet ecclesiae catholicae
1415 – Religious reformers John Wycliffe and Jan Hus were condemned as heretics at the Council of Constance.
1471 – Wars of the Roses: The Battle of Tewkesbury Edward IV defeats a Lancastrian Army and kills Edward, Prince of Wales.
1493 – Alexander VI divided non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal.
1535 – Five Carthusian monks from London Charterhouse monastery hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, London, for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England
1540 – Venice & Turkey sign Treaty of Constantinople
1626 – Dutch explorer Peter Minuit landed on Manhattan Island. Native Americans later sold the island (20,000 acres) for $24 in cloth and buttons.
1688 – King James II orders his Declaration of Indulgence read in English churches
1715 – A French manufacturer debuted the first folding umbrella.
1776 – Rhode Island declared its freedom from England two months before the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
1783 – Herschel reports seeing a red glow near lunar crater Aristarchus
1799 – Fourth Anglo-Mysore War: The Battle of Seringapatam ends the Siege of Seringapatam when the city is assaulted and the Sultan of Mysore Tipu Sultan is killed by the besieging British army, under the command of General George Harris
1814 – Napoleon Bonaparte disembarked at Portoferraio on the island of Elba in the Mediterranean.
1846 – US state of Michigan ends death penalty
1863 – The Battle of Chancellorsville ended when the Union Army retreated.
1886 – Haymarket Square Riot: A bomb exploded on the fourth day of a workers’ strike in Chicago, IL. Eight people died in the violence during violence that day.
1904 – The U.S. formally took control of the property for construction of the Panama Canal.
1910 – Tel Aviv founded
1916 – Germany agreed to limit its submarine warfare after a demand from U.S. President Wilson.
1917 – Arabs sack Tel Aviv
1919 – May Fourth Movement: Student demonstrations take place in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, protesting the Treaty of Versailles, which transferred Chinese territory to Japan
1923 – New York state revokes its Mullan-Gage Act Prohibition law; federal Volstead Act still in place
1924 – The 1924 Summer Olympics open in Paris, France
1927 – Nicaragua agrees to a US supervised presidential election in 1928
1932 – Al Capone, convict of income tax evasion, enters Atlanta Penitentiary
1942 – The United States began food rationing.
1945 – German troops in Netherlands, Denmark & Norway surrender
1946 – In San Francisco Bay, US Marines from the Treasure Island Marine Barracks stop a two-day riot at Alcatraz federal prison. Five people are killed in the riot.
1949 – The entire Torino football (soccer) team (except for one player who did not take the trip due to an injury) is killed in a plane crash at the Superga hill at the edge of Turin, Italy
1957 – Alan Freed hosts “”Rock n’ Roll Show”” first prime-time network rock show
1961 – Thirteen civil rights activists, dubbed “Freedom Riders,” began a bus trip through the South.
1966 – Soviet Government signs accord about building Fiat factory in USSR
1970 – The Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on students during an anti-Vietnam war protest at Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine others were wounded.
1972 – “The Don’t Make A Wave Committee,” a fledgling environmental organization founded in Canada in 1971, officially changes its name to “Greenpeace Foundation”
1977 – US Catholic bishops rescind automatic excommunications for divorced and remarried Catholics (receiving communion still outlawed if the previous marriages were not annulled by Church tribunals)
1981 – The Federal Reserve Board raised its discount rate to 14%.
1987 – The First Bank of the United States was listed as a National Historic Landmark.
1988 – The PEPCON disaster rocked Henderson, Nevada, as tons of space shuttle fuel detonated during a fire
1989 – Iran-Contra Affair: Former White House aide Oliver North is convicted of three crimes and was acquitted of nine other charges. The convictions, however, are later overturned on appeal
1990 – Latvia proclaims renewal of its independence after the Soviet occupation.
1994 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed a historic accord on Palestinian autonomy that granted self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.
1998 – A federal judge in Sacramento, California, gives “”Unabomber”” Theodore Kaczynski four life sentences plus 30 years after Kaczynski accepted a plea agreement sparing him from the death penalty
2000 – The citizens of London elected their mayor for the first time.
2003 – Idaho Gem was born. He was the first member of the horse family to be cloned.
2012 – In Las Vegas, NV, Google received the first self-driving vehicle testing license.
2013 – 5 US soldiers are killed by a bomb in Kandahar, Afghanistan
2018 – California overtakes Great Britain to become the worlds fifth largest economy
2020 – World leaders pledge $8 billion to research treatments and a vaccine for COVID-19, with the US and Russia not taking part
2021 – Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador makes an historic apology to the Mayan people for abuses against them in the five centuries since the Spanish conquest
2022 – First of its kind study of transgender children, by Princeton University, transitioning aged 3-12, found vast majority continue to identify with their new gender five years later
2023 – In 2022 Covid-19 slipped from third to fourth leading cause of death in the US (behind heart disease, cancer and unintentional injuries) according to National Center for Health Statistics
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
