On May 29, 1453, Ottoman forces captured Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.
In 1736 American patriot Patrick Henry was born in Hanover County, Va.
In 1765 Patrick Henry denounced the English Stamp Act in Virginia’s House of Burgesses, then responded to a cry of ”Treason” by saying: ”If this be treason, make the most of it!”
In 1848 Wisconsin joined the Union as the 30th state.
In 1903 entertainer Bob Hope was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, England.
In 1917 John Kennedy, who was to become the 35th U.S. president, was born in Brookline, Mass.
In 1932 World War I veterans marched on Washington to demand cash bonuses that they weren’t scheduled to receive for another 13 years.
In 1942 actor John Barrymore died in Los Angeles; he was 60.
In 1943 Norman Rockwell’s portrait of ”Rosie the Riveter” appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.
In 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to reach the top of Mt. Everest, the world’s tallest peak.
In 1973 Tom Bradley defeated incumbent Sam Yorty to be elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles.
In 1980 Vernon Jordan, National Urban League president, was shot and seriously wounded in a motel parking lot in Ft. Wayne, Ind.
In 1985 British soccer fans attacked Italian fans preceding the European Cup final in Brussels; the stampede killed 39 people.
In 1987 a jury in Los Angeles found “Twilight Zone” director John Landis and four associates not guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the movie-set deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two children.
In 1988 President Ronald Reagan began his first visit to the Soviet Union as he arrived in Moscow for a superpower summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 1994 Khallid Abdul Muhammad, a former spokesman for the Nation of Islam, was shot and wounded after delivering a speech at the University of California, Riverside. (James Edward Bess, a former Nation of Islam minister, was charged and later convicted of attempted murder and assault and sentenced to life in prison. Muhammad died of a brain aneurysm in 2001.)
In 1995 Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both the House and the Senate, died in Skowhegan, Maine; she was 97.
In 1996 Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Israeli prime minister.
In 1998 former Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1964, died in Paradise Valley, Ariz.; he was 89.
In 2001 four followers of Osama bin Laden were convicted in New York of a global conspiracy to murder Americans, including the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people. Also in 2001 the Supreme Court ruled that disabled golfer Casey Martin could use a cart to ride in tournaments.
In 2004 Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor fired by President Richard Nixon for refusing to curtail his Watergate investigation in the “Saturday Night Massacre,” died in Brooksville, Maine; he was 92.
In 2005 French voters soundly rejected the European Union’s proposed constitution, which also was defeated by the Dutch days later. Also in 2005 Dan Wheldon won the Indianapolis 500 as Danica Patrick’s electrifying run fell short (she finished fourth).
In 2006 a car bomb exploded in Baghdad, killing two British members of a CBS News crew, a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi interpreter, and seriously injuring CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier.
