  | May 2008 | |
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| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| | | | 1
The Empire State Building officially opened in 1931. | 2
The Scottish newspaper Inverness Courier reported a sighting of the “Loch Ness Monster” in 1933, beginning a media and tourist frenzy. | 3
Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Fletcher and Lieutenant Colonel William Benedict piloted the first plane to land at the North Pole in 1952. |
4
A storm system of an estimated 76 tornadoes hit the Midwest on this day in 1999, killing 44 people. | 5
Cinco de Mayo is celebrated. | 6
Baseball player Willie Howard Mays Jr. was born in 1931. | 7
The American Medical Association was founded in 1847. | 8
Militant members of the American Indian Movement, who had occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for 70 days, surrendered to federal officials in 1973. | 9
President Wilson proclaimed the first national Mother’s Day in 1914. | 10
A ceremony marked the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States in 1869. |
11
The first coins of Europe’s single currency, the euro, were produced in 1998. | 12
Poet Edward Lear was born in 1812. | 13
Mathematician Lazare Nicolas Marguérite Carnot was born in 1753. | 14
Lewis and Clark began their famous expedition to explore the American West in 1803. | 15
U.S. airmail began service in 1918. | 16
Congress voted to issue the five-cent nickel in 1866. | 17
Sue, the largest, most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex fossil found to date, went on display at the Field Museum in Chicago in 2000. |
18
Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. | 19
The U.S. Congress passed the Quota Act, which established national quotas for immigrants, in 1921. | 20
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862. | 21
Pioneering fossil collector Mary Anning was born in 1799. | 22
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, was born in 1859. | 23
Captain William Kidd was hanged for piracy in 1701.
| 24
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened to traffic in 1883. |
25
Congress passed the first copyright law in 1790. | 26
The treaty resulting from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) was signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972. | 27
Industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in 1794. | 28
Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, fell to forces of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front in 1991. | 29
Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, became the first explorers to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. | 30
Mariner 9 departed for Mars in 1971. | 31
Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu was born in 1912. |
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