Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On May 1, 1992, on the third day of the Los Angeles riots, a visibly shaken Rodney King appeared in public to appeal for calm, pleading, “Can we all get along?”
On this date:
1707: The Kingdom of Great Britain was created as a treaty merging England and Scotland took effect.
1915: The RMS Lusitania set sail from New York, headed for Liverpool, England. It was torpedoed and sunk by Germany off the coast of Ireland six days later.
1931: New York’s 102-story Empire State Building was dedicated. Singer Kate Smith made her debut on CBS Radio on her 24th birthday.
1945: A day after Adolf Hitler took his own life,
Admiral Karl Doenitz effectively became sole leader of the Third Reich with the suicide of Hitler’s propaganda minister,
Josef Goebbels.
1960: The Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane over Sverdlovsk and captured its pilot,
Francis Gary Powers.
1963: James W. Whittaker became the first American to conquer Mount Everest as he and Sherpa guide Nawang
Gombu reached the summit.
1967: Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. They divorced in 1973.
1971: The intercity passenger rail service Amtrak went into operation.
1982: The World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, was opened by President Ronald Reagan.
1991: Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers threw his seventh no-hitter at age 44, shutting out the Toronto Blue Jays 3-0.
Rickey Henderson of the Oakland A’s set a major league record by stealing his 939th base during a game against the New York Yankees.
2009: Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced his retirement effective at the end of the court’s term in late June. President Barack Obama chose federal judge Sonia
Sotomayor to succeed him.
2011: President Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden during a U.S. commando operation (because of the time difference, it was early May 2 in Pakistan, where the al-qaida leader met his end).
Ten years ago: Pakistan-born U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad failed in an attempt to set off a homemade bomb in an SUV parked in New York’s Times Square. Shahzad is serving a life prison sentence.
Five years ago: Baltimore’s top prosecutor charged six police officers with felonies ranging from assault to murder in the death of Freddie Gray, who’d suffered a spinal injury while riding in a police van.
One year ago: Tensions between Justice Department leaders and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team broke into public view as Attorney General William Barr pushed back at what he called “snitty” complaints by the special counsel over Barr’s handling of the report from the Trumprussia investigation.