Posted by Perry
I don’t know about most of you, but I love history. I could spend hours watching documentaries on it – everything from World War II to the American Revolution and anything in between. I found this page about what happened in history on this date and thought it would be fun to post it here for other ‘history buffs’ like me. So without further delay, here’s what happened on May 1st in history.
On this date in:
1707 The Kingdom of Great Britain was created as a treaty merging England and Scotland took effect.
1786 Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” premiered in Vienna.
1863 The Battle of Chancellorsville begins in Virginia.
1931 The 102-story Empire State Building in New York City was dedicated.
1941 The Orson Welles film “Citizen Kane” premiered in New York.
1948 The People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea) was proclaimed.
1967 Anastasio Somoza Debayle became president of Nicaragua.
1967 Singer Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu in Las Vegas.
1971 Amtrak went into service, combining and streamlining the operations of 18 intercity passenger railroads.
1992 On the third day of the Los Angeles riots, Rodney King appeared in public to appeal for calm, asking “Can we all get along?”
1998 Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader who later renounced his past and became a Republican, died at age 62.
1999 The Mercury space capsule Liberty Bell 7 that Gus Grissom flew in 1961 was found in the Atlantic Ocean 300 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral, Fla.
2001 Thomas E. Blanton Jr. became the second ex-Ku Klux Klansman to be convicted in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., that claimed the lives of four black girls. (He was later sentenced to life in prison.)
2003 President George W. Bush landed in a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast and, in a speech to the nation, declared major combat in Iraq over.
2007 In only his second veto, President George W. Bush rejected legislation to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq in a showdown with Congress over whether the war should end or escalate.