Monday, May 9

This Day In History

• 1502   Christopher Columbus left Cadiz, Spain, on his fourth and final trip to the Western Hemisphere.
• 1754   A cartoon in Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette showed a snake cut into sections, each part representing an American colony; the caption read, ''Join or die.''
• 1913   The 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the election of U.S. senators by popular vote rather than selection by state legislatures, was ratified.
• 1926   Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first men to make an airplane flight over the North Pole.
• 1936   Italy annexed Ethiopia.
• 1936   Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy started their own radio show on NBC
• 1945   U.S. officials announced that the midnight entertainment curfew was being lifted immediately.
• 1960   The Food and Drug Administration approved use of a birth control pill.
• 1961   Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow condemned television programming as a ''vast wasteland'' in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters.
• 1974   The House Judiciary Committee opened hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.
• 1974   Bruce Springsteen performed a concert in Cambridge, Mass., that prompted rock critic Jon Landau to write, "I saw rock and roll's future and it's name is Bruce Springsteen."
• 1978   The bullet-riddled body of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who'd been abducted by the Red Brigades, was found in an automobile in the center of Rome.
• 1980   A Liberian freighter rammed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida, killing 35 motorists and causing a 1,400-foot section of the bridge to collapse.
• 1994   Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, was placed under quarantine after an outbreak of the Ebola virus.
• 2000   Former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards was convicted of extortion schemes to manipulate the licensing of riverboat casinos.
• 2002   Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening suspended all executions in his state while a study was done on whether the death penalty was being meted out in a racially discriminatory way.

Happy Birthday To

• 1800   John Brown (abolitionist: led attack on Harper’s Ferry in 1859; executed [hanged] Dec 2, 1859)
• 1946   Candice Bergen
• 1949   Billy Joel (Grammy Award-winning singer)