Today in History
By Associated Press
May 10
In 1775, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, along with Col. Benedict Arnold, captured the British-held fortress at Ticonderoga, New York.
In 1818, American patriot Paul Revere, 83, died in Boston.
In 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured by Union forces in Irwinville, Georgia.
In 1869, a golden spike was driven in Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.
In 1924, J. Edgar Hoover was named acting director of the Bureau of Investigation (later known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI).
In 1933, the Nazis staged massive public book burnings in Germany.
In 1941, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, parachuted into Scotland on what he claimed was a peace mission. (Hess ended up serving a life sentence at Spandau Prison until 1987, when he apparently committed suicide at age 93.)
In 1994, the state of Illinois executed serial killer John Wayne Gacy, 52, for the murders of 33 young men and boys.
In 1995, 104 miners were killed in an elevator accident in Orkney, South Africa.
In 2002, a tense 39-day-old standoff between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ended with 13 suspected militants flown into European exile and 26 released into the Gaza Strip.
In 2013, U.S government scientists said worldwide levels of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, had hit a milestone, reaching an amount never before encountered by humans.
In 2014, Michael Sam was picked by the St. Louis Rams in the seventh round of the NFL draft, becoming the first openly gay player drafted by a pro football team.
In 2022, Russia pummeled the vital Ukrainian port of Odesa in an apparent effort to disrupt supply lines and Western weapons shipments critical to the defense of the capital, Kyiv.
In 2023, Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican infamous for fabricating his life story, was indicted on charges that he duped donors, stole from his campaign and lied to Congress about being a millionaire.
May 11
In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam to become governor of New Netherland.
In 1858, Minnesota became the 32nd state of the Union.
In 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded during a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.
In 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration was created as one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.
In 1946, the first CARE packages, sent by a consortium of American charities to provide relief to the hungry of postwar Europe, arrived at Le Havre, France.
In 1953, a tornado devastated Waco, Texas, claiming 114 lives.
In 1960, Israeli agents captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In 1973, the espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo in the “Pentagon Papers” case came to an end as Judge William M. Byrne dismissed all charges, citing government misconduct.
In 1996, an Atlanta-bound ValuJet DC-9 caught fire shortly after takeoff from Miami and crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing all 110 people on board.
In 2010, Conservative leader David Cameron, at age 43, became Britain’s youngest prime minister in almost 200 years after Gordon Brown stepped down and ended 13 years of Labour government.
In 2020, Twitter announced that it would add a warning label to tweets containing disputed or misleading information about the coronavirus.
In 2022, the Senate fell far short in a rushed effort toward enshrining Roe v. Wade abortion access as federal law, blocked by a Republican filibuster. The move came after a draft report from the Supreme Court overturning the 50-year-old ruling. (The 6-3 decision would be issued essentially as drafted the following month.)
In 2023, Manhattan prosecutors said they would bring criminal charges against a man accused of using a deadly chokehold on an unruly passenger aboard a New York City subway train.
—From AP reports
