This Week in History

May 27

     

     1789: First lady Martha Washington arrived at the new presidential residence in Philadelphia.

1907: Bubonic plague broke out in San Francisco, Calif.

1927: The Ford Motor Company ceased manufacture of the Ford Model T and began to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.

1930: The 1,046-feet-tall Chrysler Building in New York City, the tallest man-made structure at the time, opened to the public.

1933: The Walt Disney Company released the cartoon Three Little Pigs, with its hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”

1937: The Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian traffic, linking San Francisco and Marin counties.

1967: The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy was launched by Jacqueline Kennedy and her daughter, Caroline.

2018: Indianapolis 500: Will Power becomes the first Australian driver to win the event.

2019: World’s rivers widely contaminated with antibiotics according to new global study of 711 sites.

 

May 28

 

1503: England and Scotland signed ‘A Treaty of Everlasting Peace,’ resulting in a peace that lasted 10 years.

1892: John Muir organized the Sierra Club in San Francisco, Calif.

1934: The Dionne quintuplets were born to Oliva and Elzire Dionne near Callander, Ontario, Canada. They became the first quintuplets to survive infancy.

1937: The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was officially opened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., who pushed a button signaling the start of vehicle traffic over the span. German automobile manufacturer Volkswagen was founded.

1999: Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper was put back on display in Milan, Italy, after 22 years of restoration work.

2018: One million French smokers quit in one year after anti-smoking measures introduced according to Public Health France.

2019: Johnson & Johnson go on trial in Oklahoma accused of deceptively marketing painkillers and downplaying risks of addiction helping create “opioid epidemic”, first of 2,000 cases against US pharmaceutical firms.

May 29

 

1790: Rhode Island ratified the U.S. Constitution.

1848: Wisconsin was admitted as the 30th U.S. state.

1919: Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity was tested (and later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington and Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin at Cambridge University.

1953: Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1973: Tom Bradley was elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles, Calif.

2016: IPL Cricket Final, M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore: Sunrisers Hyderabad beat Royal Challengers Bangalore by 8 runs; David Warner 69 (38).

2019: World’s smallest surviving baby, a girl, discharged from Sharp March Birch Hospital in San Diego after being born at 23 weeks weighing 8.6 ounces (245 grams).

 

May 30

 

1868: Decoration Day (the predecessor of Memorial Day) was observed in the United States for the first time.

1911: At Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the first Indianapolis 500 ended, and Ray Harroun in his Marmon Wasp became the first winner of the 500-mile auto race.

1922: The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C.

1958: The remains of two unidentified U.S. servicemen, killed in action during World War II and the Korean War respectively, were buried at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.

2012: Vishwanathan Anand wins his fifth World Chess Championship.

2019: Two new studies find eating processed foods leads to an early death and ill health published in “British Medical Journal”.

 

May 31

 

1790: The United States enacted its first copyright statute, the Copyright Act of 1790.

1879: Gilmore’s Garden in New York was renamed Madison Square Garden by William Henry Vanderbilt and opened to the public at 26th Street and Madison Avenue.

1927: The last Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line after a production run of 15,007,003 vehicles.

1929: The first talking Mickey Mouse cartoon, “The Karnival Kid,” was released.

1971: In accordance with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed by Congress in 1968, observation of Memorial Day occurred on the last Monday in May for the first time, rather than on the traditional Memorial Day of May 30.

2018: Uganda’s parliament imposes tax on social media to stop gossip.

 

June 1

 

1779: Benedict Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, was court-martialed for defecting to the British side.

1792: Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the United States.

1796: Tennessee was admitted as the 16th state of the United States.

1813: In a sea battle near Boston, Mass., James Lawrence, the mortally-wounded commander of the USS Chesapeake, gave his final order: “Don’t give up the ship!”

1844: Julia Gardner married President John Tyler at the White House. He became the first president to marry while in office.

1868: James Buchanan, 15th president, died near Lancaster, Pa.

1980: Cable News Network (CNN) began broadcasting.

2009: General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the fourth largest U.S. bankruptcy in history.

2018: US unemployment rate falls to 3.8%, lowest since 2000.

 

June 2

 

1924: U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.

1953: Queen Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Her Other Realms and Territories & Head of the Commonwealth. The coronation was the first major international event to be televised.

1979: Pope John Paul II started his first official visit to his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a communist country.

2004: Ken Jennings began his 74-game winning streak on the syndicated game show Jeopardy!.

2017:  “Wonder Woman” directed by Patty Jenkins released, earns over $100 million in North American in its opening weekend – domestic record for a female director.

2019:  US Open Women’s Golf, CC of Charleston: Lee Jeong-eun of South Korea wins her first major title; beats runners-up Lexi Thompson, Agel Yin and Ryu So-yeon by 2 strokes.