567 BC – Servius Tullius, the king of Rome, celebrates a triumph for his victory over the Etruscans.
240 BC – First recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet.
1521 – The Diet of Worms ends when Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, issues the Edict of Worms, declaring Martin Luther an outlaw.
1738 – A treaty between Pennsylvania and Maryland ends the Conojocular War with settlement of a boundary dispute and exchange of prisoners.
1878 – Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore opens at the Opera Comique in London.
1895 – The playwright, poet, and novelist Oscar Wilde is convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons” and sentenced to serve two years in prison.
1925 – Scopes Trial: John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in Tennessee.
1961 – Apollo program: President John F. Kennedy announces before a special joint session of the Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a “man on the Moon” before the end of the decade.
1962 – The Old Bay Line, the last overnight steamboat service in the United States, goes out of business.
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Robert Capa was a Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist. He is arguably among the greatest combat photographers.
Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. |
1977 – Chinese government removes a decade old ban on William Shakespeare’s work, effectively ending the Cultural Revolution started in 1966.
1979 – Etan Patz, who is six years old, disappears from the street just two blocks away from his home in New York City, prompting an international search for the child, and causing the President Ronald Reagan to designate May 25 as National Missing Children’s Day (in 1983).
Births
1334 – Emperor Sukō of Japan (d. 1398)
1803 – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet and philosopher (d. 1882)
1929 – Beverly Sills, American soprano and actress (d. 2007)
Deaths
615 – Pope Boniface IV (b. 550)
675 – Li Hong, Chinese prince (b. 652)
1632 – Adam Tanner, Austrian mathematician and philosopher (b. 1572)
1954 – Robert Capa, Hungarian photographer and journalist (b. 1913)
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com and many other Google searches