May 6
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May 6
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Today is:
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Born on this Day
0973: Henry II "the Saint," Holy Roman Emperor
1585: John Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas
1740: John Penn, signer of the Declaration of Independence
1758: Maximilien Robspierre, French revolutionary who instituted the
Reign of Terror. He eventually fell victim to the guillotine to which he had condemned so
many others.
1856: Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud
1856: Robert Edwin Peary in Cresson, Pennsylvania. U.S. Arctic explorer.
He led the first expedition to reach the North Pole in 1909.
1870: A.P. Giannini, founder of Bank of America
1895: Legendary silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino (Rodolpho Alfonzo
Rafaello Pietro Guglieimi Di Valentina D'Antonguolla) in Castellaneta, Italy. His films
included ``The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,'' ``The Sheik'' and ``Blood and Sand.'
1898: The conductor Jacha Horenstein was born in Kiev. Horenstein was
one of the earliest devoted Mahlerites, and conducted Mahler's long, emotional symphonies
whenever he had the opportunity. Horenstein also should get a lot of the credit for
keeping the music of Carl Nielsen alive during Nielsen's most obscure years.
1913: Actor Stewart Granger
1915: Orson Welles, U.S. actor, director, producer and writer. His film
``Citizen Kane'' is regarded as one of the most influential films in history.
1915: Author Theodore White
1921: Jazz musician Fred Randall
1921: Producer Ross Hunter (Martin Fuss)
1923: Actress Elizabeth Sellars
1931: Baseball Hall-of-Famer Willie Mays ('Say Hey Kid')
1945: Rock singer Bob Seger
1945: Singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore
1946: Actor Ben Masters
1951: Rock musician Davey Johnstone (Elton John's trio)
1952: Actor Gregg Henry
1953: British Labor Party leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair
1954: Rock singer Billy Burnette (Fleetwood Mac)
1959: Actress Mare Winningham
1961: Actor George Clooney
1961: Actor Clay O'Brien ("The Apple Dumpling Gang")
1962: Actress Lori Singer
1963: Actress Roma Downey ("Touched By an Angel")
1964: Rock singer-musician Tony Scalzo (Fastball)
1967: Rock musician Mark Bryan (Hootie and the Blowfish)
1092: Consecration of Cathedral at Lincoln, England
1210: Cathedral of Rheims destroyed by fire
1211: New Rheims cathedral begun
1249: Reginald II assumes Manx throne
1312: Council of Vienne abolishes the Templars, and
condemns the Beguines
1527: Rome was sacked when troops under Charles, Duke of
Bourbon, pillaged the city and killed some 4,000 inhabitants.
1536: Anne Boleyn writes her last letter to Henry VIII of
England
1536: Jacques Cartier's third expedition leaves Canada for
France
1542: St. Frances Xavier arrives in Goa, India
1545: Henry VIII's "Primer" henceforth to be
used in all English churches
1567: Bothwell, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, enter
Edinburgh
1591: Eighty-five "witches" burned at Guelch
1634: Beacon set on Beacon Hill, Boston
1638: Death of Cornelis Jansen, theologian
1757: Frederick II of Prussia attacked Austrian troops
defending Prague in the Seven Years' War. The attack succeeded and Prague fell with 10,000
Austrian casualties.
1758: Maximilien-Francois-Marie-Isidore de Robespierre,
one of the principal figures of the French revolution, born.
1814: A famous organist and organ builder of Beethoven's
day, Joseph Vogler, died. Vogler inspired Robert Browning to compose a poetic epitaph
which included the lines, "for my resting places is found the C major of this life so
now I will try to sleep."
1840: The first adhesive postage stamps, the Penny Black
and the Twopenny Blue, went on sale in Britain.
1851: Dr. John Gorrie of Apalachicola, Florida, patented
the mechanical refrigerator.
1851: Linus Yale of Newport, New York, received a patent
for the clock-type lock. Yale locks are among the top brands of security devices sold
today.
1861: Arkansas seceded from the Union.
1863: Confederate forces commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee
routed Union troops under Gen. Joseph Hooker at the battle of Chancellorsville in
Virginia.
1864: The Civil War battle of the Wilderness in Virginia
ended; General Lee's Confederate forces defeated a superior Federal force led by General
Grant.
1882: British statesman Lord Cavendish was murdered by
Irish nationalists soon after arriving in Dublin as chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant
of Ireland.
1877: The Sioux chief Crazy Horse surrenders and gives up
all claim to Nebraska.
1882: Congress passed, over President Arthur's veto, the
Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from the US for ten years.
1889: The Paris Exposition formally opened, featuring the
just-completed Eiffel Tower.
1891: Electrician Irwin H. Hoover began installing
electrical wiring in the White House.
1910: Britain's King Edward the Seventh died. His son
acceeded to the throne as George V.
1915: Babe Ruth, playing for the Boston Red Sox, hit his
first major-league home run. "The Sultan of Swat" went on to hit 714
round-trippers before he retired as a New York Yankee in 1935.
1919: Lyman Frank Baum, U.S. author of children's stories
about the imaginary land of Oz, died. The film version of his ``Wonderful Wizard of Oz''
became a cinema classic.
1919: The Paris Peace Conference disposed of Germany's
colonies; German East Africa was assigned as a League of Nations mandate to Britain and
France, German South-West Africa as a mandate to South Africa.
1932: President Paul Doumer was assassinated by a Russian
emigre in Paris.
1935: The Works Progress Administration began operating.
1937: The hydrogen-filled German dirigible
"Hindenburg" burned and crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 of the 97
people on board.
1941: Josef Stalin became official leader of the Soviet
government.(replacing Vyacheslav M. Molotov.)
1942: During World War Two, some 15,000 Americans and
Filipinos on Corregidor surrendered to the Japanese.
1954: Medical student Roger Bannister broke the
four-minute mile during a track meet in Oxford, England, in three minutes, 59.4 seconds.
1957: Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book "Profiles in Courage.""
1960: Britain's Princess Margaret married Anthony
Armstrong-Jones, a commoner, at Westminster Abbey. (They divorced in 1978.)
1962: In 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.
1968: The worst street fighting in Paris since the
liberation shook the left bank as students and police fought for control of the
fashionable Boulevard St. Germain. The University of the Sorbonne was closed.
1974: West German Chancellor Willy Brandt resigned after
an aide was arrested on charges of spying for East Germany.
1976: An earthquake struck the town of Udine in northern
Italy, killing 973 people and leaving over 100,000 homeless.
1979: In Austria's general election, Dr. Bruno Kreisky's
Socialist Democratic Party was returned to power for a fourth consecutive term.
1981: The U.S. expelled all Libyan diplomats, citing was
it said was the Libyan government's support for international terrorism.
1981: Yale architecture student Maya Ying Lin was named
winner of a competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
1983: West German government experts announced scientific
tests had proven the purported Hitler diaries to be "obvious fakes" that the
experts said were derived from a book on the Nazi dictator written in the 1960's.
1984: Voters in El Salvador went to the polls for the
second time in six weeks, this time to decide a presidential runoff between Jose Napoleon
Duarte and Robert D'Aubuisson. (Duarte would emerge the winner.)
1985: The space shuttle Challenger ended a one-week
mission in orbit with a safe landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
1986: In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, Soviet
officials revealed that radiation escaped from the damaged nuclear reactor for 36 hours
before area residents were evacuated because the plant staff did not realize the
seriousness of the accident.
1987: CIA Director William J. Casey died at age 74.
1987: Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart held a
news conference in Hanover, New Hampshire, in which he denied ever having an affair with
Miami model Donna Rice, but declined to say whether he'd ever committed adultery.
1988: In his first comment on the matter, President Reagan
said he didn't "look kindly upon" reports that a memoir written by his former
chief of staff, Donald Regan, painted an unflattering portrait of first lady Nancy Reagan.
1989: "Sunday Silence" scored a
two-and-a-half-length upset victory over "Easy Goer" in the 115th Kentucky Derby
at Churchill Downs.
1990: Soviet authorities agreed to open for just one day
eight crossing points along a 260-mile stretch of the River Prut, which had marked the
division of Moldavia between Romania and the Soviet Union since 1945.
1990: Freed American hostage Frank Reed told a news
conference in Arlington, Virginia, that he had been savagely beaten by his captors in
Lebanon after two unsuccessful escape attempts.
1990: Former president P.W. Botha quit South Africa's
ruling National Party as a protest against the apartheid reform program of his successor
F.W. de Klerk.
1991: President 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.
1992: Marlene Dietrich, film's legendary femme fatale,
died at her home in Paris at age 90. The German-born actress shot to fame as cabaret
singer Lola-Lola in ``The Blue Angel'' and then took Hollywood by storm with such classics
as ``The Scarlet Empress,'' ``Dishonoured'' and ``The Devil is a Woman.''
1992: Former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev delivered
a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where Winston Churchill had spoken of
the "Iron Curtain;" Gorbachev said the world was still divided, between North
and South, rich and poor.
1992: Actress Marlene Dietrich died at her Paris home at
age 90.
1993: The Bosnian Serb parliament, for the third time,
rejected a United Nations peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina. The president of Serbia,
Slobodan Milosevic, ordered a blockade of supplies except food and medicine to the Bosnian
Serbs.
1993: The space shuttle "Columbia" landed safely
in California after a ten-day mission.
1994: The U.N. Security Council tightened sanctions
against Haiti to pressure its military rulers to allow the return of exiled President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
1994: Former Arkansas state worker Paula Corbin Jones
filed suit against President Clinton, alleging he'd sexually harassed her in 1991.
1994: For the first time since the Ice Age, a direct link
connected Britain and mainland Europe. Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and French President
Francois Mitterrand opened the Channel Tunnel.
1994: Nelson Mandela and his ANC named their team for a
post-apartheid government of national unity.
1995: Friends and relatives of the Oklahoma City bombing
victims made a somber pilgrimage to the site of the attack to say good-bye to their loved
ones.
1995: In London, thousands of World War II veterans, along
with dignitaries from around the world, gathered to begin commemorations of the 50th
anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat - V-E Day.
1995: Long-shot Thunder Gulch won the 121st Kentucky
Derby.
1996: The body of former CIA director William E. Colby was
found washed up on a riverbank near his southern Maryland vacation home, eight days after
he'd disappeared.
1996: Guatemala's leftist guerrillas signed a key accord
in talks with the government of President Alvaro Arzu aimed at ending 35 years of civil
war.
1997: President Clinton wrapped up his visit to Mexico as
he and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo pledged closer cooperation on immigration and
drug smuggling.
1997: Army Staff Sergeant Delmar G. Simpson was sentenced
to 25 years in prison for raping six trainees at Abereeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
1997: World chess champion Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep
Blue computer played to a draw in game three of their six-game match.
1998: Representative 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.
1998: Astronomers announced the detection of a gamma ray
burst in a galaxy 12 billion light years away that was equal to the energy expended by the
sun in one trillion years.
1999: Russia and the Western powers set aside their
differences over NATO airstrikes and drafted a joint plan to end the Kosovo conflict.
1999: President 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."
1999: Reversing decades of overwhelming loyalty to
Britain's governing Labor Party, Scottish and Welsh voters elected strong nationalist
oppositions to their first separate assemblies of modern times.
2000: Jack Mazzan, who'd spent 20 years on death row for the murder of a judge's son, was released on bail, three months after the Nevada Supreme Court reversed his conviction.
2000: "Fusaichi Pegasus" became the first favorite to win the Kentucky Derby since "Spectacular Bid" in 1979.
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