TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Saturday, May 16.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
On May 16, 1943, the nearly month-long Warsaw Ghetto Uprising came to an end as German forces crushed the Jewish resistance and blew up the Great Synagogue.
ON THIS DATE
In 1770, Marie Antoinette, age 14, married the future King Louis XVI of France, who was 15.
In 1868, at the U.S. Senate impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, 35 out of 54 senators voted to find Johnson guilty of“high crimes and misdemeanors” over his attempted dismissal of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, falling one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict; the trial ended 10 days later after two other articles of impeachment went down to defeat as well.
In 1939, the federal government began its first food stamp program in Rochester, New York.
In 1953, Associated Press correspondent William N. Oatis was released by Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia, where he had been imprisoned for two years after being forced to confess to espionage while working as the AP’s Prague bureau chief.
In 1966, China launched the Cultural Revolution, a radical as well as deadly reform movement aimed at purging the country of “counterrevolutionaries.”
In 1975, Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
In 1984, comedian Andy Kaufman died in Los Angeles at age 35.
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court, in California v. Greenwood, ruled that police could search discarded garbage without a search warrant. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report declaring nicotine was addictive in ways similar to heroin and cocaine.
In 1990, death claimed entertainer Sammy Davis
Jr. in Los Angeles at age 64 and“Muppets”creator Jim Henson in New York at age 53.
In 1991, Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to address the United States Congress as she lauded U.S.-British cooperation in the Persian Gulf War.
In 2006, the Pentagon released the first video images of American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the military headquarters and killing 189 people on 9/11.
Ten years ago: BP crews finally succeeded in keeping some of the oil rushing from a blown well out of the Gulf of Mexico by hooking up a milelong tube to funnel the crude into a tanker ship Lebaneseborn Miss Michigan Rima Fakih won the 2010 Miss USA title.
Five years ago: U.S. commandos killed a man described as the Islamic State’s head of oil operations in a rare ground attack inside Syria.
One year ago: The death of globe-trotting architect I.M. Pei was confirmed by his New York company; one of Pei’s sons said he had died overnight at the age of 102.
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” — Studs
Terkel, American author and historian (born this date in 1912, died 2008).
— ASSOCIATED PRESS