On May 11, 1647, Peter Stuyvesant arrived in Dutch New Amsterdam, now New York, to become governor.
In 1858 Minnesota became the 32nd state of the Union.
In 1888 Israel Baline, who became famed songwriter Irving Berlin, was born in present-day Belarus.
In 1894 workers began a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Co., prompting Eugene Debs’ American Railway Union to boycott Pullman, blocking freight traffic in and out of Chicago.
In 1910 Glacier National Park in Montana was established.
In 1927 satirist Mort Sahl was born in Montreal.
In 1933 Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, was born Louis Eugene Walcott in Roxbury, Mass.
In 1943, during World War II, U.S. forces landed on the Aleutian island of Attu, which had been captured by the Japanese; the Americans retook the island 19 days later.
In 1944 Allied forces launched a major offensive against German lines in Italy.
In 1946 the first postwar relief packages from CARE (originally known as the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe) arrived in Le Havre, France.
In 1947 the B.F. Goodrich Co. of Akron announced development of a tubeless tire.
In 1949 Israel was admitted to the United Nations as the world body’s 59th member.
In 1973 charges against Daniel Ellsberg for his role in the ”Pentagon Papers” case were dismissed by Judge William Byrne, who cited government misconduct.
In 1981 reggae artist Bob Marley died of cancer in Miami; he was 36.
In 1985 55 people died when a flash fire swept a packed soccer stadium in Bradford, England.
In 1987 doctors in Baltimore transplanted the heart and lungs of an auto accident victim into a patient who gave up his own heart to another recipient. (Clinton House, the nation’s first living heart donor, died 14 months later.)
In 1994 Arkansas put to death two convicted murderers; it was the first time a state executed two people on the same day since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to restore the death penalty in 1976.
In 1995 a United Nations conference indefinitely extended the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was originally set to expire after 25 years.
In 1996 an Atlanta-bound ValuJet DC-9 caught fire shortly after takeoff from Miami and crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing all 110 people on board.
In 1997 the IBM computer known as Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov to win a six-game chess match between man and machine in New York.
In 1998 Ameritech and SBC, the communications company once known as Southwestern Bell, announced details of a $56.6 billion agreement under which SBC would take over its Midwestern neighbor.
In 2000 Pope John Paul II named Bishop Edward Egan of Bridgeport, Conn., the new head of the New York archdiocese, succeeding the late Cardinal John O’Connor.
In 2001 Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft delayed Timothy McVeigh’s execution from May 16 to June 11 because of FBI mishandling of documents.
In 2003 Canada beat Sweden 3-2 in Finland to win its first hockey world championship in 6 years.
In 2004 a video on an Al Qaeda-linked Web site showed the beheading of American hostage Nicholas Berg, who had been kidnapped in Iraq.
In 2005 more than 1,000 demonstrators rioted against a U.S. military convoy in Afghanistan, as protests spread over a Newsweek report that interrogators had desecrated Islam’s holy book at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. (Newsweek later retracted the story.)
In 2006 former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson died in New Paltz, N.Y.; he was 71.
