Saturday, May 21, 2005

Satruday, May 21

This Day In History

  • 1542   Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto died while searching for gold along the Mississippi River.
  • 1832   The first Democratic National Convention got under way, in Baltimore.
  • 1840   New Zealand was declared a British colony.
  • 1881   Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross.
  • 1892   The opera ''I Pagliacci'' by Ruggiero Leoncavallo was first performed, in Milan, Italy.
  • 1924   Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, two students at the University of Chicago, killed a 14-year-old boy in a ''thrill killing.''
  • 1956   The United States exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.
  • 1959   The musical ''Gypsy'' opened on Broadway.
  • 1968   The nuclear-powered U.S. submarine Scorpion, with 99 men aboard, was last heard from. (The remains of the sub were later found on the ocean floor 400 miles southwest of the Azores.)
  • 1979   Former San Francisco City Supervisor Dan White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting deaths of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk; White's argument that junk food had fueled his rampage was derided as the ''Twinkie defense.''
  • 1991   Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber.
  • 1998   A 15-year-old student open fired inside Thurston High School in Springfield, Ore., killing two students and wounding 23, one day after killing his parents.
  • 1999   Susan Lucci, star of the ABC soap opera ''All My Children,'' won a Daytime Emmy Award for best actress for the first time in the 19th straight year she was nominated.
  • 2003   Christie Whitman resigned as Environmental Protection Agency administrator.
Happy Birthday To
  • 1917   Raymond (William Stacy) Burr (actor: Perry Mason, Ironside)
  • 1921   Andrei Sakharov (physicist: produced first Soviet atomic bomb, also hydrogen bomb; human rights activist: formulated concepts of perestroika and glasnost; died Dec 14, 1989)
  • 1923 &nbs/ul>

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