May 14
1607: Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was established by members of the Virginia Company.
1804: The Lewis and Clark expedition, organized to explore the Louisiana Territory and the Pacific Northwest, began its journey near present-day Hartford, Illinois.
1948: The independent state of Israel was proclaimed in Tel Aviv by David Ben-Gurion, who became its first prime minister.
May 15
1800: President John Adams ordered government offices to relocate from Philadelphia to the newly constructed city of Washington in the federal District of Columbia.
1862: President Abraham Lincoln signed an act establishing the Department of Agriculture.
1928: Mickey Mouse made his first public appearance in a test screening of the short “Plane Crazy.” (He made his formal debut six months later in “Steamboat Willie.”)
May 16
1929: The first Academy Awards were presented. “Wings” won Outstanding Picture, while Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor were named best actor and best actress.
1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising came to an end as German forces crushed the Jewish resistance and destroyed the Great Synagogue.
1966: The Chinese Communist Party issued the May 16 Notification, criticizing “counterrevolutionary revisionists” and marking the start of the Cultural Revolution.
May 17
1792: The Buttonwood Agreement, a document codifying rules for securities trading, was signed by 24 New York stockbrokers, marking the formation of the New York Stock Exchange.
1875: The first Kentucky Derby was held; Aristides won the race, ridden by jockey Oliver Lewis.
1954: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruled unanimously that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal and unconstitutional.
May 18
1863: The Siege of Vicksburg began during the Civil War; it ended July 4 with a Union victory that gave its forces control of the Mississippi River.
1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility.
1980: Mount St. Helens in Washington state erupted, leaving an estimated 57 people dead or missing.
May 19
1536: Anne Boleyn, the second wife of England’s King Henry VIII, was beheaded at the Tower of London after being convicted of adultery.
1883: William Cody staged the first of his “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” shows in Omaha, Nebraska.
1920: Ten people were killed in a gunbattle in Matewan, West Virginia, between coal miners — led by a local police chief — and private security guards hired to evict them for joining a union.
May 20
1861: North Carolina seceded from the Union, becoming the 10th state to join the Confederacy early in the Civil War.
1862: President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, encouraging settlement west of the Mississippi River by making federal land available for private ownership and farming; by 1934, about 10% of the nation’s land — roughly 270 million acres — had been privatized.
1873: Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received a U.S. patent for riveted work pants, leading to the large-scale production of denim blue jeans.1956: The United States exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.
