TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 1945

With World War II in Europe at an end, Soviet forces liberated Czechoslovakia from Nazi occupation. U.S. officials announced that a midnight entertainment curfew was being lifted immediately.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1712

The Carolina Colony was officially divided into two entities: North Carolina and South Carolina.

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.

1958

“Vertigo,” Alfred Hitchcock’s eerie thriller starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, premiered in San Francisco, the movie’s setting.

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.”

1962

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology succeeded in reflecting a laser beam off the surface of the moon.

1965

Russian-born American pianist Vladimir Horowitz performed publicly for the first time in 12 years with a recital at Carnegie Hall in New York.

1974

The House Judiciary Committee opened public hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.