TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1994

South Africa’s newly elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first Black president.

ALSO ON THIS DATE

1712

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

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.

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.

1951

The U.S. conducted its first thermonuclear experiment as part of Operation Greenhouse by detonating a 225-kiloton device on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific nicknamed “George.”

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.

1970

President Richard Nixon made a surprise and impromptu pre-dawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial, where he chatted with a group of protesters who’d been resting on the Memorial steps after protests against the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings.