May 5, 1821: Napoleon dies.
May 6, 2013: Three women missing for more than a decade are found alive in the home of Ariel Castro, in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Georgina “Gina” DeJesus had been kidnapped by Ariel Castro and held captive in his home. They had been subsequently imprisoned until Berry escapes with her then-six-year-old daughter and contacts the police. Knight and DeJesus are rescued by responding officers, and Castro is arrested within hours.
Two day later, Castro will be charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape. He will plead guilty to 937 criminal counts of rape, kidnapping, and aggravated murder as part of a plea bargain. He’ll be sentenced to life plus 1,000 years in prison without the possibility of parole. One month into his sentence, Castro will commit suicide by hanging himself with bed sheets in his prison cell.
Shit, I’ve got a really bad taste in my mouth after posting that. Rot in hell, monster.
May 7, 1915: German submarine U-20 sinks RMS Lusitania, the world’s largest passenger ship, off the southern coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 people. The ship had been bound for Liverpool from New York, and had been scheduled to dock later that afternoon. Aboard her are 1,266 passengers and a crew of 696, which combined total to 1,962 people. Following the U-20’s attack there is a second unexplained internal explosion, probably that of munitions she had been carrying, send her to the seabed in 18 minutes. In all, only six out of 48 lifeboats are launched successfully, with several more overturning and breaking apart.
In spite of her carrying war munitions, Lusitania was technically unarmed and was carrying thousands of civilian passengers, and so the British government will accuse the Germans of breaching the Cruiser Rules. The sinking will cause a storm of protest in the United States, because 128 American citizens were among the dead. The sinking will help shift public opinion in the United States against Germany, and will be one of the factors in the United States’ declaration of war nearly two years later.
May 7, 1945: Germany surrenders unconditionally to the Allies, and the war in Europe is over.
Regards,
Shodan
May 8, 1902: In one of the deadliest volcanic disasters in history, Mt. Pelee on Martinique erupts, killing over 30,000 people. Most deaths are caused by pyroclastic flows which destroy the city of Saint-Pierre, which had been the largest city on the island, within minutes of the eruption. It will be reported that out of the 30,000 in the city, there are only two survivors: Louis-Auguste Cyparis, a felon held in an underground cell in the town’s jail, and Léon Compère-Léandre, a man who had lived at the edge of the city. In reality, there are a number of survivors who made their way out of the fringes of the blast zone. Many of these survivors are horribly burned, and some will later die from their injuries.
On a trip to Martinique in 1998, I stood in Louis-Auguste Cyparis’ cell, and I climbed Mt. Pelee. Very foggy, wet and muddy.
May 8, 1842: The Versailles rail accident in France kills nearly 200. A broken accident on the locomotive led to passenger cars piling up and catching fire. At the time it was the world’s deadliest railroad accident.
May 9, 1974: The United States House Committee on the Judiciary opens formal and public impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon.
On February 6, The Committee was authorised by Resolution 803 of the House “to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America.” The motion was carried by 410-4 and instructed the Committee to “report to the House of Representatives such resolutions, articles of impeachment, or other recommendations as it deems proper.”
Today, on May 9, under the chairmanship of Peter Rodino, the Committee begins public hearings to review the results of the Impeachment Inquiry staff’s investigation.
This will not end well for Nixon.
May 9, 1877: The Iquique earthquake in Chile kills over 2300. Most of these deaths occur not in South America, but thousands of miles across the ocean on the Fiji islands as a result of a tsunami. There were also five deaths in Hawaii.
May 10, 1994: Barbra Streisand begins her first concert tour in 27 years.
In 1993, The New York Times music critic Stephen Holden wrote that Streisand “enjoys a cultural status that only one other American entertainer, Frank Sinatra, has achieved in the last half century”. In September 1993, Streisand announced her first public concert appearances in 27 years. What began as a two-night New Year’s event at the MGM Grand Las Vegas led to a multi-city tour in the summer of 1994. Tickets for the tour were sold out in under an hour. Streisand also appeared on the covers of major magazines in anticipation of what Time magazine named “The Music Event of the Century”. The tour is one of the biggest all-media merchandise parlays in history. Ticket prices range from $50 to $1,500, making Streisand the highest-paid concert performer in history. Barbra Streisand: The Concert will go on to be the top-grossing concert of the year and earn five Emmy Awards and the Peabody Award, while the taped broadcast on HBO will be the highest-rated concert special in HBO’s 30-year history.
May 10, 1849: The Astor Place Riot in New York leaves somewhere between 25 and 31 dead, and over a hundred injured. This is also known as the Shakespeare Riot because the dispute at the Astor Opera House involved different interpretations of MacBeth. Really. The working class preferred rugged American Edwin Forrest’s performance, while the well-heeled New York elite liked English actor William Charles Macready. The two actors were rivals and when working class mobs tried to get tickets and get into the theater to jeer Macready, the police and local militia intervened, the crowd became unruly and a bunch of people were shot. At the time, The Astor Place Riot caused the largest number of civilian casualties in America since the Revolutionary War.
May 11, 1960: In Buenos Aires, Argentina, four Israeli Mossad agents capture fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann who has been living under the alias of Ricardo Klement. Eichmann had been one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.
Eichmann will be brought to Israel to stand trial on 15 criminal charges, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people. During the trial, he will not deny the Holocaust or his role in organizing it, but will claim that he was simply following orders in a totalitarian Führerprinzip system. He will be found guilty on all of the charges, and will be executed by hanging on June 1, 1962.
May 11, 1996: 8 climbers are killed in a blizzard on Mt. Everest. The disaster is described vividly in John Krakauer’s best seller Into Thin Air.
May 12, 1846: The Donner Party of pioneers departs Independence, Missouri, for California, on what will become a year-long journey of hardship and cannibalism. Delayed by a series of mishaps, they will spend the winter of 1846–47 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the emigrants will resort to cannibalism to survive, eating the bodies of those who had succumbed to starvation and sickness.
The journey west usually takes between four and six months, but the Donner Party will be slowed by following a new route called Hastings Cutoff, which crosses Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and Great Salt Lake Desert. The rugged terrain, and the difficulties they will later encounter while traveling along the Humboldt River in future Nevada, will result in the loss of many cattle and wagons, and splits within the group.
By the beginning of November 1846 the emigrants will reach the Sierra Nevada, where they will become trapped by an early, heavy snowfall near Truckee Lake, high in the mountains. Their food supplies will run low, and in mid-December some of the group will set out on foot to obtain help. Rescuers from California will attempt to reach the emigrants, but the first relief party will not arrive until the middle of February 1847, almost four months after the wagon train will become trapped. Of the 87 members of the party, only 48 will survive to reach California.
Historians will describe the episode as one of the most spectacular tragedies in Californian history and in the record of western migration.
May 13, 1637: Cardinal Richelieu of France reputedly creates the table knife. The distinguishing feature of a table knife is its blunt or rounded end. Richelieu’s invention is an attempt to cure dinner guests of the habit of picking their teeth with their knife-points.
Later, in 1669, King Louis XIV of France will ban pointed knives in the street and at his table, insisting on blunt tips, in the hope that it would reduce violence.
May 13, 1972: The Sennichi Department Store Building Fire in Osaka, Japan kills 118 and injures 78.
May 14, 1932: The “WE WANT BEER!” parade in New York City.
During the height of the Great Depression, getting 100,000 people hyped up about anything other than available paid work would seem an impossible task. Jobs are scarce, money is tight, and morale is low. But there is one thing that can drive the masses to the streets of New York City in the thousands – Beer.
On this day, New York City Mayor and consummate showman Jimmy Walker leads a “Beer for Taxation” march, which popularly becomes known as the “We Want Beer!” parade, through the streets of the city. “The parade will furnish the best count of noses I can think of, much better than the passing of resolutions, or the writing of letters to Representatives in Congress,” Walker explains to The New York Times. An estimated 100,000 people turn out to show their distaste for Prohibition and the 18th Amendment, and their love for beer.
When Congressman Emanuel Celler hears about the event, he states that he’d come and bring a bunch of friends. You’re able to pick him out in the crowd by the two signs he’s holding: “Never Say Dry” and “Open the Spigots and Drown the Bigots.” The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and the Grand Army of the Republic (a group of Civil War veterans) also turn out to march in the parade. Students and society matrons alike also join the fray.
May 15, 1836: Francis Baily observes “Baily’s beads” during an annular eclipse.
As the moon covers the sun during a solar eclipse, the rugged topography of the lunar limb allows beads of sunlight to shine through in some places while not in others. Lunar topography has considerable relief because of the presence of mountains, craters, valleys, and other topographical features. The irregularities of the lunar limb profile (the “edge” of the Moon, as seen from a distance) are known accurately from observations of grazing occultations of stars. Astronomers thus have a fairly good idea which mountains and valleys will cause the beads to appear in advance of the eclipse. While Baily’s beads are seen briefly for a few seconds at the center of the eclipse path, their duration is maximized near the edges of the path of the umbra.
May 15, 1850: The Bloody Island massacre in California occurs when somewhere between 150 and 200 Pomo Indians are slaughtered by the U.S. Calvary. Most of the dead are the elderly, women and children.
Ugh. Can’t even blame spellcheck for that one.:smack: