May 25
240 B.C.: The passage of Halley’s Comet was first recorded.
1953: The first public television station in the United States officially began broadcasting as KUHT from the campus of the University of Houston.
1961: President John F. Kennedy announced to a special joint session of Congress that it was his goal to put a man on the moon before 1970.
1968: The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Mo., was dedicated.
1977: The movie Star Wars was released.
2018: Barbados elects its first female Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who leads the Barbados Labour Party to victory.
2019: First ever albino panda footage in the wild released (taken in April) from China’s Wolong National Nature Reserve.
May 26
1864: Montana was organized as a U.S. territory.
1897: Dracula, a novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, was published.
1907: Iconic U.S. actor John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa. (Died 1979.)
1977: Mountain climber George Willig of Queens, New York, climbed the south tower of the World Trade Center.
1998: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Ellis Island, the historic gateway for millions of immigrants, is mainly in the state of New Jersey, not New York.
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.
1937: The Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian traffic, linking San Francisco and Marin counties.
1986: Dragon Quest, the game credited as setting the template for role-playing video games, was released in Japan.
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.
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
1736: Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death”) was born in Hanover County, Virginia.
1790: Rhode Island ratified the U.S. Constitution.
1848: Wisconsin was admitted as the 30th U.S. state.
1886: Pharmacist John Pemberton placed his first advertisement for Coca-Cola, in The Atlanta Journal.
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.
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.
1899: Old West outlaw Pearl Hart, a woman, committed the last recorded stagecoach robbery, 30 miles southeast of Globe, Ariz.
1922: The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C..
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.
2005: Vanity Fair revealed that one-time FBI official Mark Felt was Watergate whistleblower Deep Throat.
2015: Harriette Thompson aged 92 and 65 days becomes the oldest woman to complete a marathon (Suja Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego).
2018: Uganda’s parliament imposes tax on social media to stop gossip.
ON THIS DAY… MAY 25 – MAY 31
May 25
NATIONAL WINE DAY
The celebration begins as soon as the cork is popped. Cheers!
May 26
NATIONAL BLUEBERRY CHEESECAKE DAY
Although originating in ancient Greece, blueberry cheesecake is one of the most popular desserts in the US.
May 27
NATIONAL SUNSCREEN DAY
This is the perfect time to recognize the danger of the sun’s ultraviolet rays that come with going to the beach, the lake, even the backyard.
May 28
NATIONAL HAMBURGER DAY
Americans eat over 50 billion burgers a year, so it’s only fitting we set aside a whole day for these special sandwiches.
May 29
NATIONAL PAPERCLIP DAY
The paperclip, in various forms, shapes, and sizes, has been around for a little under two centuries now.
May 30
MEMORIAL DAY
A time to honor those who died while fighting in the U.S. Armed Forces, a holiday steeped in somber American history and tradition.
May 31
NATIONAL SMILE DAY
Founded by dentists, this day is meant to, “share with the world what the power of a healthy smile can do!”