TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Saturday, May 28, the 148th day of 2022. There are 217 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On May 28, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, made up of freed Blacks, left Boston to fight for the Union in the Civil War.
On this date:
■ In 1892, the Sierra Club was organized in San Francisco.
■ In 1918, American troops fought their first major battle during World War I as they launched an offensive against the German-held French village of Cantigny (kahntee-NYEE’); the Americans succeeded in capturing the village.
■ In 1934, the Dionne quintuplets — Annette, Cecile, Emilie, Marie and Yvonne — were born to Elzire Dionne at the family farm in Ontario, Canada.
■ In 1937, Neville Chamberlain became prime minister of Britain.
■ In 1940, during World War II, the Belgian army surrendered to invading German forces.
■ In 1959, the U.S. Army launched Able, a rhesus monkey, and Baker, a squirrel monkey, aboard a Jupiter missile for a suborbital flight which both primates survived.
■ In 1964, the charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization was issued at the start of a meeting of the Palestine National Congress in Jerusalem.
■ In 1972, Edward, the Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated the English throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, died in Paris at age 77.
■ In 1977, 165 people were killed when fire raced through the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky.
■ In 1987, to the embarrassment of Soviet officials, Mathias Rust (mah-TEE’uhs rust), a young West German pilot, landed a private plane in Moscow’s Red Square without authorization. (Rust was freed by the Soviets the following year.)
■ In 1998, comic actor Phil Hartman of “Saturday Night Live” and “NewsRadio” fame was shot to death at his home in Encino, California, by his wife, Brynn, who then killed herself.
■ In 2020, people torched a Minneapolis police station that the department was forced to abandon amid spreading protests over the death of George Floyd. Protesters in New York defied a coronavirus prohibition on public gatherings, clashing with police; demonstrators blocked traffic and smashed vehicles in downtown Denver before police used tear gas to disperse the crowd. At least seven people were shot as gunfire erupted during a protest in Louisville, Kentucky, to demand justice for Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was fatally shot by police in her home in March.
Ten years ago: President Barack Obama paid tribute on Memorial Day to the men and women who died defending America; speaking at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, Obama pointed to Vietnam veterans as an under-appreciated and sometimes maligned group of war heroes.
Five years ago: A series of shootings in rural Mississippi claimed the lives of eight people, including a sheriff’s deputy. (Willie Cory Godbolt was convicted in the killings and sentenced to death.) Takuma Sato won the Indianapolis 500 to give owner Michael Andretti a second consecutive victory. Angelique Kerber became the first women’s No. 1 seed to be defeated in the French Open’s first round in the Open era, losing 6-2, 6-2 to 40th-ranked Ekaterina Makarova of Russia.
One year ago: Officials announced that the remains of more than 200 children, some as young as 3 years old, had been found buried on the site of what was once Canada’s largest indigenous residential school. (Unidentified remains would also be found in unmarked graves at other residential schools across Canada.) Senate Republicans blocked creation of an independent, bipartisan panel to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, displaying continuing party loyalty to former President Donald Trump; the vote meant that questions about who should bear responsibility for the attack would continue to be handled by congressional committees. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said kids at summer camps could skip wearing masks outdoors, with some exceptions.