May 5
1494 - During his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus landed in present-day Jamaica.
1809 - Mary Kies of South Killingly, Connecticut, became the first woman to be granted a patent. The patent was for the rights to a technique for weaving straw with silk and thread.
1818 - Political philosopher Karl Marx was born in Prussia.
1821 - Napoleon Bonaparte died on the island of St. Helena at age 51.
1891 - Carnegie Hall (then known as Music Hall) opened in New York City with Peter Tchaikovsky serving as guest conductor.
1892 - Congress extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for 10 years.
1893 - Panic hit the New York Stock Exchange; by year's end the country was in the throes of a severe depression.
1925 - John Scopes was arrested in Tennessee for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. (Scopes was found guilty, but his conviction was later set aside.)
1942 - Wartime sugar rationing began in the United States.
1945 - In the only fatal attack of its kind during World War II, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon, killing the pregnant wife of a minister and five children.
1945 - Denmark and the Netherlands were liberated as a German surrender went into effect.
1955 - West Germany became a sovereign state.
1961 - Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard the Mercury capsule Freedom 7 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1981 - Bobby Sands of the Irish Republican Army died in a prison hospital on the 66th day of his hunger strike.
1985 - President Ronald Reagan attended a wreath-laying ceremony at a military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany. The visit drew worldwide condemnation because 49 members of the Waffen SS were buried there.
1994 - Singapore caned American teenager Michael Fay for vandalism, a day after the sentence was reduced from six lashes to four in response to an appeal by President Bill Clinton.
2004 - Pablo Picasso's "Boy with a Pipe" became the most expensive painting ever sold at $104.2 million. (The record has since been broken several times, with the record now being $450 million paid in 2017 for "Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci.)
2009 - Texas health officials confirmed the first death of a U.S. resident with swine flu.
2010 - Preliminary plans for a mosque and cultural center near ground zero in New York were unveiled, setting off a national debate over whether the project was disrespectful to 9/11 victims and whether opposition to it exposed anti-Muslim biases.
2012 - Five Guantanamo Bay prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, were arraigned in a proceeding that dragged on for 13 hours due to stalling tactics by the defendants.
2014 - A narrowly divided Supreme Court upheld Christian prayers at the start of local council meetings.
2016 - Former Los Angeles trash collector Lonnie Franklin Jr. was convicted of 10 counts of murder in the “Grim Sleeper” serial killings that targeted poor, young Black women over two decades.
2017 - President Donald Trump signed his first piece of major legislation, a $1 trillion spending bill to keep the government operating through September.
2020 - Tyson Foods said it would resume limited operations of its huge pork processing plant in Waterloo, Cockeye, with enhanced safety measures, more than two weeks after closing the facility because of a coronavirus outbreak among workers.
2020 - Facebook said it had removed several accounts and pages linked to QAnon, taking action for the first time against the far-right conspiracy theory circulated among Trump supporters.
2021 - A federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded its authority when it imposed a national eviction moratorium. (The moratorium would remain in place during a Justice Department appeal; it was allowed to expire at the end of July.)
2021 - Four months after Facebook suspended the accounts of former President Donald Trump, the company's quasi-independent oversight board upheld the bans, but told Facebook to specify how long they would last.
2021 - A government report said the U.S. birth rate had fallen by 4% in 2021, the largest single-year decrease in nearly 50 years.
Birthdays
23 - Nathan Chen (figure skater)
24 - Charlotte D'Alessio (model)
33 - Chris Brown (singer)
34 - Skye Sweetnam (singer)
34 - Adele (singer)
37 - Clark Duke (actor)
39 - Henry Cavill (actor)
41 - Danielle Fishel (actress)
41 - Craig David (singer)
43 - Vincent Kartheiser (actor)
44 - Santiago Cabrera (actor)
47 - Raheem DeVaughn (singer)
49 - Tina Yothers (actress)
63 - Brian Williams (broadcast journalist)
64 - John Miller (broadcast journalist)
65 - Richard E. Grant (actor)
65 - Lisa Eilbacher (actress)
67 - Melinda Culea (actress)
78 - John Rhys-Davies (actor)
79 - Michael Palin (comedian/actor)
82 - Lance Henriksen (actor)
84 - Michael Murphy (actor)
95 - Pat Carroll (actress)
=====================================
Today in Sports History - May 5
1904 - Cy Young of the Boston Americans pitched the first perfect game in modern major league baseball history in a 3-0 victory over the Philadelphia Athletics.
1925 - Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers goes 6-for-6 at the plate in a 14-8 win over the St. Louis Browns.
1956 - Jim Bailey became the first runner to break the four-minute mile in the U.S. He was clocked at 3 minutes, 58.5 seconds.
1969 - The Boston Celtics defeat the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games to win the NBA championship.
1973 - Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby in record time, the first of his Triple Crown victories.
1978 - Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds registered his 3,000th major league hit.
2021 - Baltimore Orioles pitcher John Means no-hits the Seattle Mariners, 6-0 in Seattle.
1494 - During his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus landed in present-day Jamaica.
1809 - Mary Kies of South Killingly, Connecticut, became the first woman to be granted a patent. The patent was for the rights to a technique for weaving straw with silk and thread.
1818 - Political philosopher Karl Marx was born in Prussia.
1821 - Napoleon Bonaparte died on the island of St. Helena at age 51.
1891 - Carnegie Hall (then known as Music Hall) opened in New York City with Peter Tchaikovsky serving as guest conductor.
1892 - Congress extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for 10 years.
1893 - Panic hit the New York Stock Exchange; by year's end the country was in the throes of a severe depression.
1925 - John Scopes was arrested in Tennessee for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. (Scopes was found guilty, but his conviction was later set aside.)
1942 - Wartime sugar rationing began in the United States.
1945 - In the only fatal attack of its kind during World War II, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon, killing the pregnant wife of a minister and five children.
1945 - Denmark and the Netherlands were liberated as a German surrender went into effect.
1955 - West Germany became a sovereign state.
1961 - Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard the Mercury capsule Freedom 7 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1981 - Bobby Sands of the Irish Republican Army died in a prison hospital on the 66th day of his hunger strike.
1985 - President Ronald Reagan attended a wreath-laying ceremony at a military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany. The visit drew worldwide condemnation because 49 members of the Waffen SS were buried there.
1994 - Singapore caned American teenager Michael Fay for vandalism, a day after the sentence was reduced from six lashes to four in response to an appeal by President Bill Clinton.
2004 - Pablo Picasso's "Boy with a Pipe" became the most expensive painting ever sold at $104.2 million. (The record has since been broken several times, with the record now being $450 million paid in 2017 for "Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci.)
2009 - Texas health officials confirmed the first death of a U.S. resident with swine flu.
2010 - Preliminary plans for a mosque and cultural center near ground zero in New York were unveiled, setting off a national debate over whether the project was disrespectful to 9/11 victims and whether opposition to it exposed anti-Muslim biases.
2012 - Five Guantanamo Bay prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, were arraigned in a proceeding that dragged on for 13 hours due to stalling tactics by the defendants.
2014 - A narrowly divided Supreme Court upheld Christian prayers at the start of local council meetings.
2016 - Former Los Angeles trash collector Lonnie Franklin Jr. was convicted of 10 counts of murder in the “Grim Sleeper” serial killings that targeted poor, young Black women over two decades.
2017 - President Donald Trump signed his first piece of major legislation, a $1 trillion spending bill to keep the government operating through September.
2020 - Tyson Foods said it would resume limited operations of its huge pork processing plant in Waterloo, Cockeye, with enhanced safety measures, more than two weeks after closing the facility because of a coronavirus outbreak among workers.
2020 - Facebook said it had removed several accounts and pages linked to QAnon, taking action for the first time against the far-right conspiracy theory circulated among Trump supporters.
2021 - A federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded its authority when it imposed a national eviction moratorium. (The moratorium would remain in place during a Justice Department appeal; it was allowed to expire at the end of July.)
2021 - Four months after Facebook suspended the accounts of former President Donald Trump, the company's quasi-independent oversight board upheld the bans, but told Facebook to specify how long they would last.
2021 - A government report said the U.S. birth rate had fallen by 4% in 2021, the largest single-year decrease in nearly 50 years.
Birthdays
23 - Nathan Chen (figure skater)
24 - Charlotte D'Alessio (model)
33 - Chris Brown (singer)
34 - Skye Sweetnam (singer)
34 - Adele (singer)
37 - Clark Duke (actor)
39 - Henry Cavill (actor)
41 - Danielle Fishel (actress)
41 - Craig David (singer)
43 - Vincent Kartheiser (actor)
44 - Santiago Cabrera (actor)
47 - Raheem DeVaughn (singer)
49 - Tina Yothers (actress)
63 - Brian Williams (broadcast journalist)
64 - John Miller (broadcast journalist)
65 - Richard E. Grant (actor)
65 - Lisa Eilbacher (actress)
67 - Melinda Culea (actress)
78 - John Rhys-Davies (actor)
79 - Michael Palin (comedian/actor)
82 - Lance Henriksen (actor)
84 - Michael Murphy (actor)
95 - Pat Carroll (actress)
=====================================
Today in Sports History - May 5
1904 - Cy Young of the Boston Americans pitched the first perfect game in modern major league baseball history in a 3-0 victory over the Philadelphia Athletics.
1925 - Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers goes 6-for-6 at the plate in a 14-8 win over the St. Louis Browns.
1956 - Jim Bailey became the first runner to break the four-minute mile in the U.S. He was clocked at 3 minutes, 58.5 seconds.
1969 - The Boston Celtics defeat the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games to win the NBA championship.
1973 - Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby in record time, the first of his Triple Crown victories.
1978 - Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds registered his 3,000th major league hit.
2021 - Baltimore Orioles pitcher John Means no-hits the Seattle Mariners, 6-0 in Seattle.
