May 2
1611: The King James Bible was published for the first time in London, England, by printer Robert Barker.
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
1802: Washington, D.C., was incorporated as a city.
1921: West Virginia became the first state to legislate a sales tax.
1957: Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, agreed to move the team from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles, Calif.
May 4
1626: Dutch explorer Peter Minuit arrived in New Netherland (present-day Manhattan Island) aboard the See Meeuw.
1776: Rhode Island became the first American colony to renounce allegiance to King George III.
Irish Catholic immigrants.
1871: The National Association, the first professional baseball league, opened its first season in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
1932: Mobster Al Capone began serving an 11-year prison sentence for tax evasion, in Atlanta, Ga.
1951: Born this day: Jackie Jackson, U.S. singer-songwriter and dancer (The Jackson 5), and Mick Mars, American guitarist and songwriter (Mötley Crüe).
1998: A federal judge in Sacramento, Calif., gave “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski of Lincoln, Mont., four life sentences plus 30 years after Kaczynski accepted a plea agreement sparing him from the death penalty.
May 5
1865: The first train robbery in the United States took place, in North Bend, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati.
1866: Memorial Day was first celebrated in the USA at Waterloo, New York.
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
May 6
1835: James Gordon Bennett Sr. published the first issue of the New York Herald.
1889: The Eiffel Tower in Paris opened for the first time.
1940: John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath.
1954: Medical student Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile (3 minutes, 59.4 seconds) during a track meet at Oxford, England.
2001: During a trip to Syria, Pope John Paul II became the first pope to enter a mosque.
May 7
1718: The city of New Orleans was founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville.
1915: A German torpedo sank the British liner RMS Lusitania off the Irish coast, killing almost 1,200 people.
1978: Ethelda Bleibtrey, the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal, died at age 76 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
2000: Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as president of Russia.
May 8
1886: Pharmacist John Pemberton first sold a carbonated beverage named “Coca-Cola” as a patent medicine, in Atlanta, Ga.
1877: The first Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show opened at Gilmore’s Gardens in New York City.
1912: Paramount Pictures was founded in Hollywood, Calif.
1978: Climbers Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler made the first ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen.