May 1
1930: The dwarf planet Pluto was officially named.
1940: The 1940 Summer Olympics in Tokyo were cancelled due to war.
1956: The polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, was made available to the public.
1978: Japan’s Naomi Uemura, travelling by dogsled, became the first person to reach the North Pole alone.
2001: The Rio Grande River, which forms part of the border between the United States and Mexico, dried up 500 yards short of the Gulf of Mexico.
2003: In what became known as the “Mission Accomplished” speech, on board the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California, President George W. Bush declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” (The war continued another 10 years.)
May 2
1918: General Motors purchased Chevrolet Motor Company of Delaware.
1945: The Soviet Union captured Berlin and Soviet soldiers hoisted the red flag over the Reichstag building. German military forces in Italy surrendered.
2000: President Bill Clinton announced that accurate GPS access would no longer be restricted to the United States military.
2012: A pastel version of The Scream, by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, sold for $120 million in a New York City auction, setting a new world record for a work of art at auction.
May 3
1948: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities are legally unenforceable.
1957: Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, agreed to move the team from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles, Calif.
1973: The 108-story Sears Tower in Chicago became the world’s tallest building at 1,451 feet.
2000: The sport of geocaching began, with the first cache placed and the coordinates from a GPS posted on Usenet.
2003: New Hampshire’s famous Old Man of the Mountain collapsed.
May 4
1910: The Royal Canadian Navy was created.
1932: Mobster Al Capone began serving an 11-year prison sentence for tax evasion, in Atlanta, Ga.
1953: Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea
1959: One of two of the first Grammy Awards were held, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles.
1972: The Don’t Make A Wave Committee, a fledgling environmental organization founded in Canada in 1971, officially changed its name to “Greenpeace Foundation.”
May 5
1925: John T. Scopes was arrested in Tennessee for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.
1934: The first Three Stooges short, Woman Haters, was released by Columbia Pictures.
1961: Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became America’s first traveler in space with a 15-minute sub-orbital flight in a capsule launched from Cape Canaveral.
1973: Race horse ‘Secretariat’ won the 1973 Kentucky Derby in 1:59.4, a record that still stands.
1981: Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands died at age 27 in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland after a 66-day hunger strike.
May 6
1940: John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath.
1941: Bob Hope performed his first USO show, at March Field, Riverside, Calif.
1954: Medical student Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile (3 minutes, 59.4 seconds) during a track meet at Oxford, England.
1981: A jury of architects and sculptors unanimously selected Maya Ying Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial from 1,421 other entries.
1994: The Channel Tunnel, “Chunnel,” opened, connecting England to France for the first time in millions of years.
2001: During a trip to Syria, Pope John Paul II became the first pope to enter a mosque.
May 7
1945: Germany formally surrendered to the Allies at Reims, France, ending World War II in Europe.
1946: Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (later renamed Sony) was founded with 20 employees.
1952: The concept of the integrated circuit, the basis for all modern computers, was first published by British engineer Geoffrey W.A. Dummer in Washington, D.C.
1998: Mercedes-Benz bought Chrysler for $40 billion and formed DaimlerChrysler in the largest industrial merger in history.
2000: Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as president of Russia.