On May 9, 1502, Christopher Columbus left Cadiz, Spain, on his fourth and final trip to the Western Hemisphere.
In 1657 William Bradford, leader of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, died in present-day Plymouth, Mass.; he was 67. He also had been the first Plymouth Colony governor and re-elected 30 times.
In 1754 a cartoon in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette showed a snake cut into sections, each part representing an American colony; the caption read, “Join or die.”
In 1760 Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the religious and social reformer and patron of the Moravian Church, died in Herrnhut in present-day Germany; he was about 60 years old.
In 1805 dramatist Friedrich von Schiller died in Weimar in present-day Germany; he was 45.
In 1913 the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the election of U.S. senators by popular vote rather than selection by state legislatures, was ratified.
In 1914 country singer and songwriter Hank Snow was born Clarence Eugene Snow in Brooklyn, Nova Scotia.
In 1926 Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first men to fly over the North Pole.
In 1936 Italy annexed Ethiopia.
In 1945 U.S. officials announced that a midnight entertainment curfew was being lifted immediately.
In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved a pill as safe for birth-control use. (The pill, Enovid, was made by G.D. Searle and Co. of Chicago.)
In 1974 the House Judiciary Committee opened hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.
In 1978 the bullet-riddled body of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who had been abducted by the Red Brigades, was found in an automobile in the center of Rome.
In 1980 35 motorists were killed when a Liberian freighter rammed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida, causing a 1,400-foot section to collapse.
In 1987 183 people died when a New York-bound Polish jetliner crashed while attempting an emergency return to Warsaw.
In 1989 President George H.W. Bush complained that Panama’s elections were marred by “massive irregularities,” and he called for worldwide pressure on Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega to step down as military leader.
In 1991 William Kennedy Smith was charged with rape after Patricia Bowman accused him of attacking her at the Kennedy family estate in West Palm Beach, Fla. (He was acquitted at trial.)
In 1994 South Africa’s newly elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first black president. Mandela promised a South Africa for “all its people, black and white.”
In 1995 President Bill Clinton arrived in Moscow for a summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Also in 1995 Kinshasa, Zaire, was placed under quarantine after an outbreak of the Ebola virus. Also in 1995 the United States returned 13 Cuban boat people to their homeland, the first refugees to be sent back under a new policy bitterly protested by Cuban-Americans.
In 1996, in dramatic video testimony to a hushed courtroom in Little Rock, Ark., President Bill Clinton insisted he had nothing to do with a $300,000 loan at the heart of the criminal case against his former Whitewater partners.
In 2002, following the example set by Illinois, Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening suspended all executions in his state while a study was done on whether the death penalty was being meted out in a racially discriminatory way. Also in 2002 a remote-controlled mine exploded during a military parade in a Russian town near Chechnya, killing 43 people.
In 2003 the United States and its allies asked the UN Security Council to give its stamp of approval to their occupation of Iraq. Also in 2003 the Republican-led House approved 222-203 a $550 billion tax cut package.
In 2004 a bomb destroyed the VIP section at a stadium during a Victory Day celebration in the Chechen capital of Grozny, killing 24 people, including the province’s president, Akhmad Kadyrov.
