ON MAY 9 ...

In 1502, Christopher Columbus left Cadiz, Spain, on his fourth and final trip to the Western Hemisphere.

In 1657 William Bradford, leader of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, died in present-day Plymouth, Mass.; he was 67. He also had been the first Plymouth Colony governor and re-elected 30 times.

In 1754 a cartoon in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette showed a snake cut into sections, each part representing an American colony; the caption read, “Join or die.”

In 1913 the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the election of U.S. senators by popular vote rather than selection by state legislatures, was ratified.

In 1926 Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first men to fly over the North Pole.

In 1936 Italy annexed Ethiopia.

In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved a pill as safe for birth control use. (The pill, Enovid, was made by G.D. Searle and Co. of Chicago.)

In 1974 the House Judiciary Committee opened hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

In 1978 the bullet-riddled body of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who had been abducted by the Red Brigades, was found in an automobile in the center of Rome.

In 1980 35 motorists were killed when a Liberian freighter rammed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida, causing a 1,400-foot section to collapse.

In 1987 183 people were killed when a New Yorkbound Polish jetliner crashed while attempting an emergency return to Warsaw.

In 1991 William Kennedy Smith was charged with rape, nearly six weeks after Patricia Bowman accused him of attacking her at the Kennedy family estate in West Palm Beach, Fla. (He was acquitted at trial.)

In 1994 South Africa’s newly elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first black president. Mandela promised a South Africa for “all its people, black and white.”

In 1996, in dramatic video testimony to a hushed courtroom in Little Rock, Ark., President Bill Clinton insisted he had nothing to do with a $300,000 loan at the heart of the criminal case against his former Whitewater partners.

In 1999 a chartered bus carrying members of a casino club on a Mother’s Day gambling excursion ran off a highway in New Orleans, killing 22 people.

In 2002, following the example set by Illinois, Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening suspended all executions in his state while a study was done on whether the death penalty was being meted out in a racially discriminatory way.

In 2003 the United States and its allies asked the UN Security Council to give its stamp of approval to their occupation of Iraq.

In 2004 a bomb destroyed the VIP section at a stadium during a Victory Day celebration in the Chechen capital of Grozny, killing 24 people, including the province’s president, Akhmad Kadyrov.

In 2008 jury selection began in the Chicago trial of R&B superstar R. Kelly, accused of videotaping himself having sex with a girl as young as 13. (Kelly was later acquitted on all counts.)

In 2016 Uber and Lyft ceased operations in Austin, Texas, after the city mandated stiffer regulation of the rideshare companies and their drivers.

In 2017 President Donald Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, dramatically ousting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the midst of an FBI investigation into whether Trump’s campaign had ties to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.