On May 2, 1519, Leonardo da Vinci died in Cloux, France.
In 1863 Confederate Gen. Thomas ”Stonewall” Jackson was wounded by his own men at Chancellorsville, Va.; he died eight days later.
In 1890 the Oklahoma Territory was organized.
In 1936 ”Peter and the Wolf,” by Sergei Prokofiev, premiered in Moscow.
In 1945 it was announced that Berlin had fallen and Nazi troops had surrendered in Italy and parts of Austria.
In 1957 Joseph McCarthy, the fiery Republican senator from Wisconsin, died in Bethesda, Md.
In 1960 serial rapist and kidnapper Caryl Chessman was executed in California.
In 1994 Nelson Mandela claimed victory in South Africa’s first democratic elections.
In 1995 President Bill Clinton agreed to allow 20,000 Cubans into the U.S. after months of detention at Guantanamo Bay.
In 1997 a national memorial honoring President Franklin Roosevelt opened in Washington. Also, Labor Party leader Tony Blair, 44, became Britain’s youngest prime minister in 185 years.
In 2002 Rev. Paul Shanley, at the epicenter of Boston’s predator-priest scandal, surrendered in San Diego to face charges in Massachusetts. (Convicted of repeatedly raping a boy in the 1980s, he was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison.)
In 2004 Martin Torrijos, son of a former dictator, won Panama’s first presidential vote since the handover of the Panama Canal in December 1999.
In 2005 Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter died at 63.
In 2006 Premier Silvio Berlusconi, the longest-serving leader in postwar Italy, resigned to make way for a center-left government led by Romano Prodi. Also, TV business commentator Louis Rukeyser died at 73 in Greenwich, Conn.
