On May 31, 455 A.D., Emperor Petronius Maximus was stoned to death by an angry mob while fleeing Rome.
On that date in 1578, King Henry III laid the first stone of the Pont Neuf (New Bridge), the oldest bridge of Paris, France.
In other rock history, May 31, 2013, marked the closest approach to Earth that the asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon will get until two centuries hence.
On May 30, 1989, student demonstrators unveiled a 33-foot high “Goddess of Democracy and Freedom” statue in Tiananmen Square.
On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the last of the original 13 British colonies to ratify the Constitution. It joined the newly re-formed union as the 13th State of the federation. On the same date in 1848, Wisconsin was admitted as the 30th U.S. state.
Hong Kong’s General Chamber of Commerce was founded on this date in 1861. In other commerce news — or, history — the pharmacist John Pemberton placed his first advertisement for Coca-Cola, which appeared in The Atlanta Journal on May 29, 1886.
Parisian ballet-goers rioted at the premiere of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on the spring day of May 29 in 1913. The caricature, above, was drawn at the time to portray the event, which is a cultural landmark of the 20th century.
In 1990, the Russian parliament elected Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
May 29th birthdays include
* 1736 – Patrick Henry, American lawyer and politician, first Governor of Virginia (d. 1799)
* 1874 – G. K. Chesterton, English essayist, poet, and playwright (d. 1936)
* 1906 – T. H. White, Indian-English writer, author of The Once and Future King (d. 1964)
* 1917 – John F. Kennedy, American lieutenant and politician, 35th President of the United States (d. 1963)
* 1929 – Harry Frankfurt, American philosopher and academic, author of On Bulshit (2005)
On May 28, 1952, the women of Greece gained the right to vote.
On May 27, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi began his attack on Palermo, Sicily, as part of the Italian unification.
In 1927 on this date in May, the Ford Motor Company ceased manufacture of the Ford Model T, the last of this model coming off the line the day previous. Over 16 million Model T Fords had been sold, and was a world transformative product. On the 27th, the company began to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.
Exactly 70 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton while he was in office.
In 2015, 27 May, the commercial space company SpaceX was approved as a contractor to the U.S. military for satellite launches; SpaceX has since led the world in its use of re-usable booster rockets which, after sending up orbital rockets, return to a sea surface platform for a safe vertical landing.
On May 26, 451, the Sassanid Empire defeated the Armenians at the battle of Battle of Avarayr, but guaranteed them freedom to openly practice Christianity.
On May 26, 1328, scholastic philosopher and Franciscan friar William of Ockham and other Franciscan leaders secretly exited Avignon, fearing a death sentence from Pope John XXII. On the same day in 1538, the city of Geneva expelled John Calvin and his followers, who headed to exile in Strasbourg.
May 25, 1818, the Swiss historian and academic Jacob Burckhardt was born. Burckhardt’s best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), but is remembered here as the author of Reflections on History (1905).
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 Patriot 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 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 the case 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 the hundredth day of 1998, the Northern Ireland peace talks ended with an historic agreement, dubbed the Belfast, or Good Friday Agreement. The accord was reached after nearly two years of talks and 30 years of conflict. A little more than a month later, on May 22, 1998, this Agreement was approved by voters across the island of Ireland in two referendums.
In Northern Ireland, voters were asked whether they supported the multi-party agreement.
In the Republic of Ireland, voters were asked whether they would allow the state to sign the agreement and allow necessary constitutional changes to facilitate it. The people of both jurisdictions needed to approve the Agreement in order to give effect to it.
The British-Irish Agreement came into force on December 2, 1999.