Today in history

74 views0

Today in history

By Correspondent

Today in history
YEARDAYEVENT
523May 6Thrasamunde, king of Vandals (496-523), died.
973May 6Henry II, German King (1002) and Holy Roman Emperor (1014-1024), was born.
988May 6Dirk II, West Frisian count of Holland, died.
1124May 6Balak, Emir of Aleppo (Syria), was murdered.
1527May 6German and Spanish troops under Charles V began sacking Rome, bringing about the end of the Renaissance. Libraries were destroyed,  Pope Clement VII was captured and thousands were killed. 147 of 189 of the Pope’s Swiss guard were killed.
1529May 6Babur defeated the Afghan Chiefs in the Battle of Ghagra, India.
1536May 6King Henry VIII ordered a bible placed in every church.
1576May 6The peace treaty of Chastenoy ended the fifth war of religion.
1581May 6Frans Francken, the Younger, painter, was born.
1606May 6Lorenzo Lippi, [Perlone Zipoli], poet, painter, was born.
1638May 6Cornelius Jansen, theologian (Jansenism), died.
1642May 6Frans Francken, the Younger, Flemish painter, died on 61st birthday.
1648May 6Battle at Zolty Wody-Bohdan: Chmielricki’s Cossacks beat John II Casimir.
1667May 6Johann Jakob Froberger (b.1616), German organist, singer, composer, died.
1682May 6King Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles, France.
1733May 61st international boxing match: Bob Whittaker beat Tito di Carni.
1740May 6John Penn, signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born.
1753May 6French King Louis XV observed a transit of Mercury at Mendon Castle.
1757May 6Battle at Prague: Frederik II of Prussia beat emperor’s army.
1758May 6Maximilien F.M.I. de Robespierre (d.1794), a leader of the French Revolution, was born. He was known as the “Sea-Green Incorruptible” from his sallow complexion. He decreed death for all those he considered enemies of the revolution.
1794May 6Jean-Jacques Beauvarget-Charpentier (59), composer, died.
1795May 6Dr. Pierre-Joseph Dessault visited the incarcerated 10-year-old dauphin, the heir to the French throne. He found the dying child in abject misery. The boy died June 8.
1801May 6British Lt. Thomas Cochrane, commander of the 14-gun sloop HMS Speedy, engaged and captured the 32-gun Spanish frigate El Gamo. The climactic battle in Patrick O’Brian’s novel “Master and Commander” is based on the Speedy’s fight with El Gamo. Cochrane was later elected to Parliament, pointed out corruption and was arrested on trumped up charges. After that he served as the first commander of Chile’s navy, then Brazil’s navy and the Greek navy before returning to England. In 2000 Robert Harvey authored “Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain.”
1806May 6Chapin Aaron Harris, founder of the America Society of Dental Surgeons, was born.
1814May 6Wilhelm Ernst, violinist, composer, was born.
1833May 6John Deere made his 1st steel plow.
1835May 6The 1st edition of NY Herald was priced at 1 cent. The Herald specialized in crime with an emphasis on murder. James Gordon Bennett was the Scottish-born steward of the Herald. Within a few years of the 1936 Jewett murder case, a coalition of clergymen, financiers and rival editors waged a “Moral War” against Bennett and his newspaper
1836May 6Christian Ignatius Latrobe (78), composer, died.
1840May 6Frederick William Stowe, was born He was the son of the famous Harriet Beecher Stowe and fighter in the Civil War for the Union.
1849May 6Wyatt Eaton, artist, was born.
1851May 6Dr. John Gorrie patented a “refrigeration machine.”
1853May 6The 1st major US rail disaster killed 46 at Norwalk, Connecticut.
1856May 6U.S. Army troops from Fort Tejon and Fort Miller prepared to ride out to protect Keyesville, California, from Yokut Indian attack.
1859May 6Baron Freidrich von Humboldt (b.1769), German naturalist and explorer who made the first isothermic and isobaric maps, died.
1861May 6Jefferson Davis approved a bill declaring War between US and Confederacy.
1862May 6Henry David Thoreau (44), American writer, died of tuberculosis. In 1999 his unfinished manuscript “Wild Fruits,” a catalog of his observations on local plants and fruits, was published.
1864May 6General Sherman began to advance on Atlanta.
1877May 6Chief Crazy Horse surrendered to U.S. troops in Nebraska. Crazy Horse brought General Custer to his end.
1882May 6Over President Arthur’s veto, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from the United States for 10 years. It was amended and passed by Congress on August 3 and was signed by Pres. Arthur. Renewals and amendments continued to 1904. The laws were repealed in 1943. In 2011 the US Senate passed a resolution expressing regret for the act.
1884May 6Buck Grant told his father, former Pres. Ulysses S. Grant, that a loan to Ferdinand Ward had gone bad and that Ward had absconded with the money. The Grants were wiped out, as were other trusting investors, including friends and family of the Grants. Ward’s Ponzi scheme led to the collapse of major financial institutions on Wall Street and around the country. In 2012 Geoffrey C. Ward, the grandson of Ferdinand Ward, authored “A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated man in the United States.
1888May 6Russell Stover, candy manufacturer, was born.
1889May 6The Paris Exposition formally opened, featuring the just-completed Eiffel Tower.
1895May 6Rudolph Valentino, legendary silent-screen star, was born in Castellaneta, Italy.
1896May 6Samuel P. Langley (1834-1906), American physicist and aviation pioneer, launched the first reasonably large, steam-powered model aircraft.
1898May 6Daniel Gerber, baby food pioneer, was born in Freemont, Mich.
1902May 6Harry Golden, Jewish humorist, writer (2 Cents Plain, Only in America), was born.
1907May 6San Francisco streetcar workers of the Carmen’s Union went on strike after owner Patrick Calhoun refused to accept a $3 per 8-hour day wage. Calhoun hired James Farley to break the union.
1908May 6The Great White Fleet, sent by Pres. Roosevelt on an around-the-world voyage, arrived in SF. The fleet left San Francisco on July 7.
1910May 6Edward VII (68), Britain’s King (1901-1910), died and George V ascended to the British throne.
1913May 6Stewart Granger, [James Stewart], actor (Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche), was born in London.
1914May 6British House of Lords rejected women suffrage.
1915May 6Orson Welles (d.1985), actor, director, and writer, was born in Kenosha, Wisc. He is famous for his movie Citizen Kane (1941).
1919May 6Paris Peace Conference disposed of German colonies; German East Africa was assigned to Britain & France, German SW Africa to South Africa.
1926May 6Marguerite Piazza, operatic soprano (Young Broadway), was born in New Orleans, LA.
1931May 6Willie Mays, the ‘Say hey ‘ kid who played baseball for the New York Giants, was born. He made a great outfield catch in the 1954 World Series.
1935May 6British King George & Queen Mary celebrated their silver jubilee.
1936May 6The Hindenburg airship departed Germany and on the 9th on May, it arrived at Lakehurst, N.J., having completed the first scheduled transatlantic dirigible flight.
1937May 6At 7:25 p.m. the giant German airship (dirigible or zeppelin) Hindenburg burst into flames and crashed to the ground as it attempted to dock with a mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. Carrying 36 passengers and 61 crew, Hindenburg left Frankfurt on May 4 for its first transatlantic voyage of the 1937 season. A total of 36 died when the fire ignited the 16 hydrogen-filled cells and destroyed the zeppelin in only 34 seconds. This included 13 passengers, 22 crew members and one of the ground crew. The airship was 803 feet long and had private rooms for 50 passengers. It had an 11,000 mile range. A newsreel film of the Hindenburg Disaster was made. The true cause of the disaster remains a mystery, although crash investigators considered claims that Hindenburg was lost due to sabotage or an accidental charge of static electricity.
1938May 6Dutch writer Maurits Dekker was sentenced to 50 days for “offending a friendly head of state” (Hitler).
1939May 61st performance of Honegger and Claudel’s “Jeanne d’Arc at the Stake.”
1940May 6A Pulitzer prize was awarded to John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath
1941May 6Dictator Josef Stalin assumed the Soviet premiership, replacing Vyacheslav M. Molotov.
1942May 6Ariel Dorfman, Chilean writer (Death and the Maiden), was born.
1943May 6British 1st army opened an assault on Tunis.
1944May 6The Red Army besieged and captured Sevastopol in the Crimea.
1945May 6Bob Seger, folk singer (Silver Bullet Band-Shake Down), was born in Dearborn, Mich.
1946May 6A Pulitzer prize was awarded to Arthur M. Schlesinger (“Age of Jackson”).
1948May 643 communist rebels were executed in Athens.
1949May 6P.M.B. Maurice Maeterlinck (b.1862), Belgian philosopher, playwright (Grand Fairie) and essayist, died in Nice, France. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature
1950May 6Liz Taylor wed Conrad Hilton Jr. in her first marriage.
1952May 6Maria Montessori (b.1870), Italian physician, educationist, died In Holland. She opened her 1st school in San Lorenzo, Italy, in 1907.
1954May 6Medical student Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile during a track meet in Oxford, England, finishing in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds.
1955May 6West Germany joined NATO.
1957May 6Last broadcast of “I Love Lucy” on CBS-TV.
1959May 6Iceland gunboats shot at British fishing ships.
1960May 6President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
1961May 6George Clooney, actor (Dr Douglas Ross-ER, Batman), was born in Lexington, KY.
1962May 6In the first test of its kind, the submerged submarine USS Ethan Allen fired a Polaris missile armed with a nuclear warhead that detonated above the Pacific Ocean.
1963May 6A Pulitzer prize was awarded to Barbara Tuchman (Guns of August).
1964May 6Joe Orton’s “Entertaining Mr. Sloan,” premiered in London. [see Apr 18]
1967May 6400 students seized the administration building at Cheyney State College, Pa.
1968May 6Astronaut Neil Armstrong was nearly killed in a lunar module trainer accident.
1970May 6Yuichiro Miura (b.1932) of Japan skied down Mt. Everest.
1974May 6Bundy victim Roberta Parks disappeared from OSU, Corvallis, Ore.
1975May 6In hockey the Philadelphia Flyers won the semifinal series over Boston 4 games to 1. On May 16  the Montreal Canadiens won the finals in 4 games.
1976May 6An earthquake struck Italy’s northern region at Friuli-Venezia Giulia, affecting 11 villages near the Austrian and Yugoslav borders. The earthquake killed more than 1,000 people in a 3,300-square-mile area and left 80,000 homeless.
1978May 6On this day at 12:34, the numbers 12345678 represented the time and day: 12:34 5/6/78. The next such sequence will occur in 2078.
1980May 6Stanford Linear Accelerator officials announced a successful collision of matter and antimatter in their new $78 million accelerator.
1981May 6Yale architecture student Maya Ying Lin was named winner of a competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
1987May 6PTL’s Jim Bakker and Rich Dortch were dismissed from Assemblies of God.
1988May 6In his first comment on the matter, President Reagan said he didn’t “look kindly” on reports that a memoir by former chief of staff Donald Regan painted an unflattering portrait of first lady Nancy Reagan.
1989May 6Sunday Silence scored an upset victory over Easy Goer in the 115th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs.
1990May 6Freed American hostage Frank Reed said at a news conference in Arlington, Va., that he had been savagely beaten by his captors in Lebanon after two unsuccessful escape attempts.
1991May 6President Bush returned to work after spending two nights at Bethesda Naval Hospital because of an irregular heartbeat; he met at the White House with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.
1992May 6Former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., where Winston Churchill had spoken of the Iron Curtain; Gorbachev said the world was still divided, between north and south and rich and poor.
1993May 6The space shuttle “Columbia” landed safely in California after a 10-day mission.
1994May 6Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and French President Francois Mitterrand formally opened the Channel Tunnel between their countries.
1995May 6Long-shot Thunder Gulch, ridden by Gary Stevens, won the 121st Kentucky Derby.
1996May 6All the nearly 16,000 public companies nationwide were required to file their financial reports electronically with the SEC. All info will go into EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system. The home page of the SEC is: http://www.sec.gov.
1997May 6World chess champion Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer played to a draw in game three of their six-game match.
1998May 6Rep. Dan Burton, chairman of the House fund-raising inquiry, apologized to GOP colleagues for the furor over his release of selected portions of tapes of Webster Hubbell’s prison conversations; Burton’s top investigator departed, ordered fired by House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
1999May 6President Clinton met with Kosovo refugees in Germany, listening to accounts of murder, rape and terror and promising them, “You will go home again in safety and in freedom.”
2000May 6The 1st geocaching cache was found hidden outside Portland, Oregon, by Mike Teague.
2001May 6An anonymous donor pledged $100 million to Johns Hopkins Univ. to develop a vaccine and new drugs for malaria.
2002May 6It was reported that the Bush administration planned to annul the 1998 US signature on the Rome Statute, a treaty for creating an int’l. war-crimes tribunal.
2003May 6President Bush lifted Clinton-era sanctions (1993-1998) against Angola’s UNITA rebels, citing the end of a quarter-century of civil war.
2004May 6An estimated 51.1 million people tuned in for the final first-run episode of “Friends” on NBC.
2005May 6President Bush arrived in Riga, Latvia, as he opened a fast-paced, four-country journey to mark the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
2006May 6Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Stipe Mesic of Croatia, the final stop of a three-nation tour dominated by the issue of political reform in countries making the post-Cold War transition toward democracy.
2007May 6Carey Bell, Mississippi-born blues harmonica player, died in Chicago.
2008May 6Sen. Barack Obama climbed within 200 delegates of clinching the Democratic presidential nomination. In the Indiana primary Clinton won 51% to 49%. In North Carolina Obama won 56% to 42%.
2009May 6Maine’s Gov. John Baldacci signed a freshly passed bill approving gay marriage, making it the fifth state to approve the practice and moving New England closer to allowing it throughout the region.
2010May 6The US FCC announced a plan to classify the last mile of internet access as a telecommunications service.
2011May 6Afghan police killed 10 militants in a gun battle in eastern Paktika province.
2012May 6George Lindsey (83), TV actor, died in Nashville. He spent nearly 30 years as the grinning Goober on “The Andy Griffith Show” (1964-1968) and “Hee Haw” (1971-1993). He played a jovial service station attendant on “Mayberry RFD” (1968-1971).
2013May 6In New York 30 horses being taken to slaughter in Canada were burned alive when the tractor-trailer transporting them caught fire on an upstate highway.
 Source: Timelines of History

Discover more from NewsBreakers

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

What's your reaction?

Excited
0
Happy
0
In Love
0
Not Sure
0
Silly
0
Previous
Next

Comments are closed.