1827 – The first nautical school opened in Nantucket, MA, under the name Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin’s Lancasterian School.
1849 – A patent for lifting vessels was granted to Abraham Lincoln.
1910 – An airplane raced a train from Albany, NY, to New York City. The airplane pilot Glenn Curtiss won the $10,000 prize.
1916 – The official flag of the president of the United States was adopted.
1916 – U.S. forces invaded Dominican Republic and remained until 1924.
1922 – Ecuador became independent.
1932 – World War I veterans began arriving in Washington, DC. to demand cash bonuses they were not scheduled to receive for another 13 years.
1951 – C.F. Blair became the first man to fly over the North Pole in single engine plane.
1953 – Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became first men to reach the top of Mount Everest.
1981 – The U.S. performed a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site.
1986 – Colonel Oliver North told National Security Advisor William McFarlane that profits from weapons sold to Iran were being diverted to the Contras.
1988 – U.S. President Reagan began his first visit to the Soviet Union in Moscow.
1990 – Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic by the Russian parliament.
1997 – The ruling party in Indonesia, Golkar, won the Parliament election by a record margin. There was a boycott movement and rioting that killed 200 people.
1999 – Space shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.
2000 – Fiji’s military took control of the nation and declared martial law following a coup attempt by indigenous Fijians in mid-May.
2001 – In New York, four followers of Osama bin Laden were convicted of a global conspiracy to murder Americans. The crimes included the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people.
2015 – The Obama adminstration removed Cuba from the U.S. terrorism blacklist. The two countries had severed diplomatic relations in January of 1961.
