On this date

1814 — The Jane Austen novel “Mansfield Park” was first published in London.

1864 — Union Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick was killed by a Confederate sniper during the Civil War Battle of Spotsylvania in Virginia.

1914 — President Woodrow Wilson, acting on a joint congressional resolution, signed a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

1926 — Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett supposedly became the first men to fly over the North Pole. (However, U.S. scholars announced in 1996 that their examination of Byrd’s flight diary suggested he had turned back 150 miles short of his goal.)

1936 — Italy annexed Ethiopia.

1945 — With World War II in Europe at an end, Soviet forces liberated Czechoslovakia from Nazi occupation.

1951 — The U.S. conducted its first thermonuclear experiment as part of Operation Greenhouse by detonating a 225-kiloton device on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific nicknamed “George.”

1961 — In a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton N. Minow decried the majority of television programming as a “vast wasteland.”

1994 — South Africa’s newly elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first black president.