On May 9, 1502, Christopher Columbus set out from Cadiz, Spain, on his fourth and last trip to the New World.
In 1754 the first American newspaper cartoon appeared in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. It showed a snake cut into sections, each representing a colony, over the caption, “Join or die.”
In 1914 the first proclamation of a national Mother’s Day was issued by President Woodrow Wilson. And country singer Hank Snow was born in Nova Scotia.
In 1936 Italy annexed Ethiopia.
In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid, the first U.S. birth-control pill.
In 1961, addressing the National Association of Broadcasters, Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, condemned television programming as “a vast wasteland.”
In 1974 the House Judiciary Committee began hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.
In 1980 a freighter crashed into Florida’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge in a thunderstorm, claiming 35 lives as it tore away a 1,400-foot section of the span and sent a bus, truck and cars plunging into Tampa Bay.
In 1987 all 183 people aboard a Polish jetliner were killed when the New York-bound plane crashed in Warsaw.
In 1994 South Africa’s newly elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first black president.
