TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Monday, May 16, the 136th day of 2022. There are 229 days left in the year. On this date in:

1770: Marie Antoinette, age 14, married the future King Louis XVI of France, who was 15.

1866: Congress authorized minting of the first five-cent piece, also known as the “Shield nickel.”

1929: The first Academy Awards were presented. “Wings” won “best production,” while Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor were named best actor and best actress. 1939: The federal government began its first food stamp program in Rochester, New York.

1943: The nearly monthlong Warsaw Ghetto Uprising came to an end as German forces crushed the Jewish resistance and blew up the Great Synagogue.

1957: Federal agent Eliot Ness, who organized “The Untouchables” team that took on gangster Al Capone, died in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, at age 54.

1960: The first working laser was demonstrated at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, by physicist Theodore Maiman.

1966: China launched the Cultural Revolution, a radical as well as deadly reform movement aimed at purging the country of “counter-revolutionaries.”

1975: Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1990: Death claimed entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. in Los Angeles at age 64 and “Muppets” creator Jim Henson in New York at age 53.

1997: President Bill Clinton publicly apologized for the notorious Tuskegee experiment, in which government scientists beginning in the 1930s deliberately allowed Black men to weaken and die of treatable syphilis.

2007: Anti-war Democrats in the Senate failed in an attempt to cut off funds for the Iraq war.

2016: President Barack Obama called on the nation to support law enforcement officers as he bestowed the Medal of Valor on 13 who risked their lives.