May 24th
 

1626 ~ Peter Minuit bought Manhattan.

1689 ~ The Act of Toleration passed the English Parliament protecting Protestants (Roman Catholics were intentionally excluded).

1743 ~ Birthday of Jean-Paul Marat, Revolutionary.

1819 ~ Birthday of Queen Victoria.

1844 ~ First electrical telegram sent by Samuel F. B. Morse from Baltimore, Maryland to Washington, D.C., saying "What hath God wrought?".

1870 ~ Birthday of Jan Christiaan Smuts, Statesman and soldier.

1893 ~ Birthday of Walter Baade, Astronomer.

1895 ~ Playwright Oscar Wilde convicted on a morals charge in London and is sentenced to prison.

1941 ~ Birthday of Bob Dylan.

1993 ~ Eritrea gains its independence from Ethiopia.

May 25th
 

1085 ~ Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo, Spain back from the Moors.

1521 ~ The Diet of Worms ended with the Edict of Worms declaring Martin Luther an outlaw.

1803 ~ Birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essayist & Poet.

1889 ~ Birthday of Igor Sikorsky, developer of a working helicopter.

1892 ~ Birthday of Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia.

1925 ~ John T. Scopes was indicted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.

1929 ~ Birthday of Beverly Sills, Soprano.

1961 ~ President Kennedy announced his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the moon" before the end of the decade.

1963 ~ In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Organization of African Unity was established.

1973 ~ Mike Oldfield released “Tubular Bells”.

May 26th
 

1538 ~ Geneva evicted John Calvin.

1799 ~ Birthday of Aleksandr Pushkin, Author.

1805 ~ In Milan's cathedral, Napoleon I of France was crowned King of Italy.

1868 ~ The impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson ended, with Johnson being found not guilty by one vote.

1878 ~ Birthday of Isadora Duncan, Dancer.

1886 ~ Birthday of Al Jolson.

1896 ~ Nicholas II became Tsar of Russia.

1907 ~ Birthday of John Wayne ("The Duke"), Actor.

1912 ~ Birthday of Jay Silverheels, Actor.

1972 ~ Willandra National Park was established in Australia.

May 27th
 

1703 ~ Tsar Peter the Great founded the city of Saint Petersburg.

1794 ~ Birthday of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Entrepreneur.

1907 ~ Birthday of Rachel Carson, Author.

1907 ~ A Bubonic plague outbreak began in San Francisco, California.

1911 ~ Birthday of Vincent Price, Actor.

1923 ~ Birthday of Henry Kissinger, American diplomat and recipient of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Peace.

1934 ~ Birthday of Harlan Ellison, science fiction Author.

1941 ~ German pocket battleship Bismarck was sunk in the North Atlantic killing 2,300.

1968 ~ George W. Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard.

1972 ~ Presidents Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon signed the SALT I agreements

May 28th
 

1371 ~ Birthday of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy.

1588 ~ The Spanish Armada, with 130 ships and 30,000 men, began to set sail from Lisbon.

1759 ~ Birthday of William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister of Great Britain.

1892 ~ John Muir organized the Sierra Club.

1908 ~ Birthday of Ian Fleming, author of James Bond books.

1934 ~ The Dionne quintuplets are born to Olivia and Elzire Dionne, becoming the first quintuplets to survive infancy.

1925 ~ Birthday of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone.

1936 ~ Alan Turing submitted “On Computable Numbers” for publishing. This is an article with considerably greater impact than "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which he proposed the famous “Turing Test”.

1944 ~ Birthday of Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City.

1964 ~ The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed.

May 29th
 

1453 ~ Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, marking the end of Byzantium.

1630 ~ Birthday of King Charles II of England.

1733 ~ Right of Canadians to keep Indian slaves upheld at Quebec City.

1763 ~ Birthday of Patrick Henry, Patriot.

1874 ~ Birthday of G. K. Chesterton, Author.

1906 ~ Birthday of T.H. White, Author.

1913 ~ Igor Stravinsky's ballet score “The Rite of Spring” was premiered in Paris.

1917 ~ Birthday of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, U.S. President

1919 ~ Observation of shifted star positions during a solar eclipse confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

1953 ~ Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

May 30th
 

1431 ~ Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

1672 ~ Birthday of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia.

1806 ~ Andrew Jackson killed a man in a duel after the man accused Jackson's wife of bigamy.

1908 ~ Birthday of Mel Blanc, voice for Barney Rubble, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, and others.

1909 ~ Birthday of Benny Goodman, Clarinetist & Bandleader.

1922 ~ The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated.

1922 ~ Birthday of Hal Clement, science fiction writer.

1934 ~ Birthday of Aleksei Leonov, first person to walk in space.

1967 ~ The Nigerian state of Biafra seceded, sparking a civil war.

1982 ~ Cal Ripken, Jr. played the first of 2,632 consecutive Major League baseball games.

May 31st
 

1048 ~ Birthday of Omar Khayyam, Persian Poet, Astronomer & Philosopher

1678 ~ Lady Godiva processed through Coventry.

1819 ~ Birthday of Walt Whitman, Poet.

1902 ~ The last Afrikaner resistance forces signed a peace treaty with the British at Pretoria, ending the Second Boer War, and ensuring British control of South Africa.

1912 ~ Birthday of Alfred Deller, Early modern countertenor.

1916 ~ The Battle of Jutland, the first and the only full-scale battleship engagement during World War I

1938 ~ Birthday of John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

1939 ~ Birthday of Terry Waite, humanitarian.

1974 ~ Syria and Israel signed a disengagement agreement to resolve the Yom Kippur War.

2003 ~ The final flight of an Air France Concorde.

June 1st
 

1495 ~ Friar John Cor recorded the first known batch of scotch whisky.

1780 ~ Birthday of Carl von Clausewitz, general.

1801 ~ Birthday of Brigham Young, Mormon church leader.

1829 ~ Captain James Stirling established the Swan River Colony in Western Australia.

1890 ~ The U.S. Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine to count census returns.

1926 ~ Birthday of Marilyn Monroe, Actress.

1928 ~ Birthday of Georgi Dobrovolski, Cosmonaut.

1938 ~ The first Superman comic was published.

1965 ~ Birthday of Nigel Short, British International Grand Master.

1980 ~ The Cable News Network began broadcasting.

June 2nd
 

455 ~ The Vandals entered Rome, and plundered the city for two weeks.

1615 ~ First Récollet missionaries arrived at Quebec City, from Rouen, France.

1740 ~ Birthday of Marquis de Sade, Author.

1840 ~ Birthday of Thomas Hardy, Poet & Novelist.

1857 ~ Birthday of Edward Elgar, Composer

1904 ~ Birthday of Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic Gold Medalist, Actor

1925 ~ Wally Pipp, first baseman of the New York Yankees, asked for a day off due to a headache. He was replaced in the lineup by Lou Gehrig, who also started the next 2,128 consecutive games.

1952 ~ Television broadcasting began in Canada, at Montreal, Quebec.

1953 ~ Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the first to be televised.

1990 ~ Death of Rex Harrison, Actor.

June 3rd
 

1098 ~ The Crusaders took Antioch.

1808 ~ Birthday of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.

1875 ~ Death of Georges Bizet, Composer.

1888 ~ The poem “Casey at the Bat”, by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, was published.

1899 ~ Death of Johann Strauss Jr., Composer.

1918 ~ Birthday of Lili St. Cyr, Ecdysiast.

1930 ~ Birthday of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Science Fiction Author.

1937 ~ The Duke of Windsor married Wallis Simpson.

1944 ~ Charles de Gaulle became Prime Minister of France.

1989 ~ The government of China sent troops to force protesters out of Tiananmen Square.

June 4th
 

780 BC ~ The earliest solar eclipse was recorded in China.

1738 ~ Birthday of King George III of Great Britain.

1792 ~ Captain George Vancouver claimed Puget Sound for Great Britain.

1878 ~ The Ottoman Empire ceded Cyprus to the United Kingdom.

1928 ~ Birthday of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Sex Therapist & Author.

1929 ~ Birthday of John Drew Barrymore, Actor.

1940 ~ German forces entered Paris.

1944 ~ Birthday of Michelle Phillips, Actress & Singer.

1965 ~ Birthday of Mick Doohan, Australian motorcycle racer.

1989 ~ Solidarity's victory in the first partly free parliamentary elections in post-war Poland sparked off a succession of peaceful anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe.

June 5th
 

1718 ~ Birthday of Thomas Chippendale, Furniture Maker.

1723 ~ Birthday of Adam Smith, Economist.

1752 ~ Benjamin Franklin showed that lightning is electricity (kite + key + lightning)

1833 ~ Ada Lovelace met Charles Babbage.

1883 ~ Birthday of John Maynard Keynes, Economist.

1887 ~ Birthday of Pancho Villa, Revolutionary.

1939 ~ Birthday of Joe Clark, sixteenth Prime Minister of Canada.

1944 ~ Allied soldiers entered Rome. It was the first capital of an Axis nation to fall.

1977 ~ The Apple II personal computer went on sale.

1995 ~ Bose-Einstein condensate first created.

June 6th
 

1622 ~ Birthday of Claude-Jean Allouez, Jesuit missionary and explorer.

1683 ~ Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum opened as the world's first university museum.

1756 ~ Birthday of John Trumbull, Painter.

1844 ~ The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) was founded in London.

1903 ~ Birthday of Aram Khachaturian, Composer.

1933 ~ The first drive-in theater opened, in Camden, New Jersey.

1935 ~ The Birthday of the current and 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

1944 ~ Operation Overlord commenced with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France.

1956 ~ The Birthday of Björn Borg, tennis player.

1984 ~ Indian Armed Forces attacked the Golden Temple in Amritsar, following an order from Indira Gandhi.

June 7th
 

1491 ~ Birthday of Jacques Cartier, Explorer.

1594 ~ Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas which divides the New World between the two countries.

1848 ~ Birthday of Paul Gauguin, Painter

1929 ~ Vatican City became a sovereign state.

1942 ~ The Battle of Midway ended in a decisive American victory.

1944 ~ Nazi SS troops executed 23 Canadian prisoners of war in Normandy.

1954 ~ Death of Alan Turing, mathematician, computer scientist.

1981 ~ The Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor.

1981 ~ Anna Kournikova, tennis player and inspiration for computer virus.


Today is the first day of the Vestalia (penus vestae) in honor of Vesta as observed by the Roman Empire.