TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

May 5, 1862

Mexican troops defeated French occupying forces in the Battle of Puebla.

ALSO ON THIS DATE

1494

During his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus landed in Jamaica.

1818

Political philosopher Karl Marx, co-author of “The Communist Manifesto” and author of “Das Kapital,” was born in Prussia.

1821

Napoleon Bonaparte, 51, died in exile on the island of St. Helena.

1892

Congress passed the Geary Act, which required Chinese in the United States to carry a certificate of residence at all times, or face deportation.

1927

“To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel, was published in London.

1942

Wartime sugar rationing began in the United States.

1945

In the only fatal attack of its kind during World War II, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon, killing the pregnant wife of a minister and five children. Denmark and the Netherlands were liberated as a German surrender went into effect.

1955

West Germany became a fully sovereign state. The baseball musical “Damn Yankees,” starring Stephen Douglass as Joe Hardy, Gwen Verdon as Lola and Ray Walston as Applegate, opened on Broadway.

1961

Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became America’s first space traveler as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury capsule Freedom 7.