Category: Today

On May 24, 1775, John Hancock was elected president of the Second Continental Congress.

Hancock’s involvement with Samuel Adams and his radical group, the Sons of Liberty, won the wealthy merchant the dubious distinction of being one of only two Patriots (the other being Sam Adams) that the Redcoats marching to Lexington in April 1775 to confiscate Patriots’ arms were ordered to arrest. When British General Thomas Gage offered amnesty to the colonists holding Boston under siege, he excluded those same two men from his offer.

On May 23, 1788, South Carolina became the 8th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

Other May 23 events include:

* 1813: South American independence leader Simón Bolívar (portrait, above) entered Mérida, where he was proclaimed El Libertador (“The Liberator”), leading the invasion of Venezuela.

* 1900: Sergeant William Harvey Carney became the first African American to be awarded the Medal of Honor, for his heroism in a Civil War battle fought 37 years prior, in 1863.

* 1958: Birthday of American comedian and game show host Drew Carey.

On May 22, 1995, in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arkansas’s congressional term limits law, 5-4, overturning the congressional term limits then the law in 23 states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

Other May 22 events include

• 1856: South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks savagely beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the halls of Congress as tensions rise over the expansion of slavery. Sumner did not return to the Senate for three years while he recovered.
• 1848: Slavery was abolished in Martinique.
• 1807: A grand jury indicted former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr on a charge of treason. Burr (in portrait, above) was later acquitted.

On May 21, 1851, slavery was abolished in Colombia, South America.

French economist and co-winner of the first (1901) Nobel Prize for Peace, Frédéric Passy (pictured above), was born on May 20, 1822.

English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was born exactly 16 years earlier.

On May 19, 1897, Irish author, playwright, and poet Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was released from Reading Prison, where he had finished, in ill health, his hard labor sentence for “gross indecency.” His “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” first published pseudonymously in a periodical with wide circulation amongst criminals, quickly achieved the status of a classic.

He died less than three years later, in exile in Europe. His most famous works include the play The Importance of Being Earnest, the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the fascinating essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”

On May 18, 1652, Rhode Island passed the first law in English-speaking North America making slavery illegal.

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On May 18, 1593, playwright Thomas Kyd’s accusations of heresy led to an arrest warrant for fellow playwright Christopher (“Kit”) Marlowe.

Kyd was the famed author of The Spanish Tragedy, and Kit Marlowe [pictured] was known for a number of plays, including The Jew of Malta and The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus.

Marlowe died a few weeks later, on May 30, without having been arrested. The circumstances of his death were bizarre, suspicious — as if written by a playwright.

On May 16, 1843, one thousand pioneers from Elm Grove, Missouri, set off for the Pacific Northwest, blazing what became known as the “Oregon Trail.”

On May 15, 1776, the Virginia Convention instructed its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States’ Declaration of Independence.

On May 14, 1787, delegates convened a Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to write a new Constitution for the United States. George Washington presided over the convention.

On the same day a century later, jurist and pamphleteer Lysander Spooner — author of several important treatises, including Trial by Jury, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, and an infamous pamphlet entitled “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority” — died.