ON THIS DATE: MAY 26

Historical events from May 26 are brought to you by Encyclopaedia Britannica. Explore more at britannica.com.

2008: American director, producer, and actor Sydney Pollack—who helmed a number of popular films, including The Way We Were (1973), Tootsie (1982), and Out of Africa (1985)—died at age 73.

1966: Formerly a colony of the Dutch and later the British, Guyana gained its independence.

1938: The House Un-American Activities Committee was created, with Martin Dies, Jr., as its chairman; it investigated alleged communist activities, and perhaps its most celebrated case was that of Alger Hiss.

1927: The Ford Motor Company ended production of its famed Model T, which had helped “democratize the automobile.”

1926: Jazz musician Miles Davis, a trumpeter who was one of the major influences on jazz from the late 1940s, was born in Alton, Illinois.

1897: Irish writer Bram Stoker published the Gothic horror classic Dracula, which became the basis for an entire genre of literature and films about vampires.

1895: American photographer Dorothea Lange, whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography, was born.

1868: The impeachment trial of U.S. President Andrew Johnson—who had been accused of, among other things, bringing “into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach the Congress of the United States”—ended with his acquittal in the Senate.