On May 31, 1809, composer Franz Joseph Haydn died in Vienna at 77.
In 1819 poet Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, N.Y.
In 1889 floods killed 2,200 people in Johnstown, Pa., after a dam collapsed.
In 1910 the Union of South Africa was founded.
In 1913 the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, took effect.
In 1916, during World War I, British and German fleets fought in the Battle of Jutland off Denmark.
In 1930 Clint Eastwood was born in San Francisco.
In 1961 South Africa became an independent republic outside the British Commonwealth.
In 1962 World War II Gestapo official Adolf Eichmann was hanged by Israel.
In 1970 a Peru earthquake killed 66,000 people.
In 1976 Martha Mitchell, the estranged wife of former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, died in New York at 57.
In 1977 the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed.
In 1983 boxing’s Jack Dempsey died in New York at 87.
In 1991 leaders of Angola’s two warring factions ended a 16-year civil war.
In 1994 Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) was indicted on 17 felony counts alleging he had stolen nearly $700,000 from the government.
In 2000 band leader Tito Puente died in New York at 77.
In 2001 FBI agent Robert Hanssen pleaded not guilty to charges of spying for Moscow. (He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.)
In 2003 Olympic Centennial Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph was arrested in Murphy, N.C. Also, Air France’s Concorde returned to Paris in a final commercial flight.
In 2005, breaking a silence of 30 years, former FBI official W. Mark Felt stepped forward as ”Deep Throat,” the secret Washington Post source who helped topple President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Also, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, was convicted of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to 9 years in prison.
