TODAY IN HISTORY

SUNDAY MAY 9, 2021 1994

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

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.

1974

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

1980

35people were killed when a freighter rammed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida, causing a 1,400-foot section of the southbound span to collapse.