| YEAR | DAY | EVENT |
| 1248 | May 15 | Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden laid the cornerstone for Köln (Cologne) cathedral. |
| 1536 | May 15 | Anna Boleyn and Lord Rochford were accused of adultery, incest, treason. |
| 1591 | May 15 | Dimitri Ivanovitch (9), Russian son of czar Ivan IV, was murdered. |
| 1610 | May 15 | Parliament of Paris appointed Louis XIII (8) as French king. |
| 1614 | May 15 | An aristocratic uprising in France ended with the treaty of St. Menehould. |
| 1618 | May 15 | Johannes Kepler discovered his harmonics law. |
| 1665 | May 15 | Pope Alexander VII condemned Jansenism. |
| 1672 | May 15 | 1st copyright law was enacted by Massachusetts. |
| 1833 | May 15 | Edmund Kean (46), English actor (Shylock), died. |
| 1842 | May 15 | Emanuel ADMJ Count de las Cases (76), French historian (Napoleon), died. |
| 1862 | May 15 | The US Department of Agriculture was created. |
| 1862 | May 15-17 | Battle of Princeton, WV. |
| 1864 | May 15 | At Battle of New Market, Virginia, Military Institute cadets repelled a Union attack. |
| 1878 | May 15 | The Tokyo Stock Exchange, Japan’s 1st public trading institution, formed. |
| 1882 | May 15 | May Laws: Czar Alexander III banned Jews from living in rural Romania. |
| 1891 | May 15 | Jules Massenet’s opera “Griselde,” premiered in Paris. |
| 1896 | May 15 | A tornado killed 78 in Texas. |
| 1912 | May 15 | Ty Cobb rushed a heckler at a NY Highlander game and was suspended. |
| 1917 | May 15 | British Lt. John Harold Pritchard was killed in a nighttime battle at Bullecourt, France. This was during the two week 2nd battle of Bullecourt on the Hindenburg Line. Thousands of dead were scattered on both sides. In 2013 Pritchard’s body was found on a farm that covered the battleground. |
| 1916 | May 15 | U.S. Marines landed in Santo Domingo to quell civil disorder. |
| 1929 | May 15 | Fire in X-ray film stock killed 125 at Crile Clinic, Cleveland. |
| 1933 | May 15 | 1st voice amplification system was used in US Senate. |
| 1934 | May 15 | US Dept. of Justice offered $25,000 reward for John Dillinger, dead or alive. |
| 1941 | May 15 | Nazi occupiers in Netherlands forbade Jewish music. |
| 1942 | May 15 | Gasoline rationing went into effect in 17 states, limiting sales to 3 gallons a week for nonessential vehicles. |
| 1943 | May 15 | Warsaw ghetto uprising ended in it’s destruction by Nazi-SS troops. |
| 1952 | May 15 | Italo Montemezzi (76), composer, died. |
| 1962 | May 15 | US marines “arrived” in Laos. |
| 1963 | May 15 | Peter, Paul & Mary won their 1st Grammy (If I Had a Hammer). |
| 1966 | May 15 | South Vietnamese army battled Buddhists and about 80 died. |
| 1968 | May 15 | A tornado at Jonesboro, Arkansas, killed 34 people. Another near Anchorage, Alaska, killed one person. |
| 1969 | May 15 | US Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned amid a controversy over his past legal fees. |
| 1973 | May 15 | Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer teamed up on NPACT’s coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings. In 1975 the MacNeil-Lehrer Report” premiered on PBS. |
| 1978 | May 15 | The US Supreme Court’s Santa Clara Pueblo vs. Martinez decision held that tribal enrollment issues are an Indian-only matter immune from outside interference. |
| 1983 | May 15 | The Madison Hotel in Boston, Mass., was destroyed by implosion. |
| 1984 | May 15 | Thomas Albright (48), art critic for the SF Chronicle, died. He had just completed his book “Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980.” |
| 1986 | May 15 | Searchers on Oregon’s Mount Hood found two teenage survivors of a hiking expedition that became trapped in a whiteout blizzard. Nine other climbers died. |
| 1987 | May 15 | President Reagan told a gathering of out-of-town reporters at the White House he did not consider himself “mortally wounded” by the Iran-Contra affair. |
| 1988 | May 15 | The Soviet Union began the process of withdrawing its 115,000 troops from Afghanistan, more than eight years after Soviet forces had entered the country. |
| 1990 | May 15 | “Portrait of Doctor Gachet” (1890) by Vincent Van Gogh sold for $82.5 million to Ryoei Saito, Japan’s second-largest paper manufacturer. |
| 1991 | May 15 | Simon and Schuster published “Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography” by Kitty Kelly. Review copies came out in April. |
| 1992 | May 15 | A judge in Los Angeles ordered police officer Laurence Powell retried on a charge of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. The charge was eventually dropped. |
| 1993 | May 15 | Prairie Bayou won the Preakness. |
| 1994 | May 15 | Supreme Court nominee Stephen G. Breyer arrived in Washington to spend the night at the White House, while Republicans joined Democrats in predicting swift Senate confirmation. |
| 1995 | May 15 | Dow Corning Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing potentially astronomical expenses from liability lawsuits. |
| 1996 | May 15 | An asteroid about a third of a mile across was detected and enroute to miss Earth by only 279,000 miles on 5/19/96. Timothy Spar and Carl Hergenrother discovered the asteroid and named it 1996 JA-1. It was traveling at 10 miles per second on a 4-year orbit around the sun. |
| 1997 | May 15 | Attorney General Janet Reno requested the death penalty for Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski. However, under an arrangement in which he admitted his guilt, Kaczynski later agreed to be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. |
| 1998 | May 15 | In Washington DC Latia Robinson (7) took control of a Honda Accord after her father passed out and drove him safely to a hospital at the beginning of rush hour. |
| 1999 | May 15 | US warplanes attacked Iraqi air defense sites after being targeted by radar. |
| 2000 | May 15 | By a five-to-four vote, the US Supreme Court threw out a key provision of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, saying that rape victims could not sue their attackers in federal court. |
| 2001 | May 15 | The US government issued new guidelines for managing high cholesterol. |
| 2002 | May 15 | The White House acknowledged that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush was told by U.S. intelligence that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network might hijack American airplanes, but that officials did not know that suicide hijackers were plotting to use planes as missiles. |
| 2003 | May 15 | China threatened possible execution or jail sentences for people who cause death or injury by deliberately spreading SARS. |
| 2004 | May 15 | Smarty Jones won the Preakness by a record 11 1/2 lengths. |
| 2005 | May 15 | Algerian Islamic militants with alleged links to al Qaeda killed 11 soldiers in the worst attack on government troops in months. |
| 2006 | May 15 | Indonesia’s Mount Merapi erupted violently, sending searing gas clouds and burning rocks down its scorched flanks and threatening villagers who refused to leave because of ancient mystical beliefs. |
| 2007 | May 15 | PM Bertie Ahern became the first Irish leader to address the joint houses of the British Parliament. |
| 2008 | May 15 | Will Elder (b.1921), founding artist at Mad Magazine (1952), died. After Mad he established himself at Playboy where he produced the “Little Annie Fanny” cartoon. |
| 2009 | May 15 | Lakhdar Boumediene (43), a Guantanamo Bay prisoner who was at the center of a Supreme Court battle over inmates’ rights, arrived in France, which agreed to take in the Algerian in a gesture to the Obama administration. |
| 2010 | May 15 | In Brazil a fire destroyed what may be the world’s largest scientific collection of dead snakes, spiders and scorpions. The Instituto Butantan’s collection of nearly 80,000 specimens was the main source for research on thousands of species. |
| 2011 | May 15 | San Francisco celebrated the 100th anniversary of its 7.46 mile Bay to Breakers race. Organizer’s hired guards to confiscate alcohol and banned iconic floats. |
| 2012 | May 15 | In Florida Tonya Thomas (33) fatally shot her four children, ages 12-17, and then killed herself in Port St. John. |
| 2013 | May 15 | Pres. Obama announced the resignation of Steven Miller, acting com missioner of the IRS. US Attorney General Eric Holder promised angry lawmakers that the Justice Department will undertake a national investigation into the IRS wrongdoing. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew forced out Steven Miller. A Treasury Department Inspector General’s report had detailed how the IRS in 2010 had targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status. |
| 2014 | May 15 | A US federal judge upheld registration requirements that are part of gun laws in Washington DC. |
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