1675 : King Charles II established the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Charles had two passions in his life: science and women who put out.
1814: Napoleon arrives at Elba to begin his exile.1886: During the Haymarket Square Riot, a bomb is thrown at policeman resulting in the police returning fire.
1904: The US begins construction on the Panama Canal.
1904: Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce meet for the first time.1929: Audrey Hepburn is born.
1932: Al Capone begins serving an 11 year sentence for tax evasion.
1937: Dick Dale is born. Here he is with Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Pipeline in the move Back to the Beach - a movie so bad I only watched it three times.1939: Paul Gleason is born. He played the villainous vice principal in The Breakfast Club and the G. Gordon Liddy-esque Clarance Beeks in Trading Places.
1941: George Will is born. Say what you will about him, he really knows how to work a bow tie.
1942: The Battle of the Coral Sea kicks off as planes from the USS Yorktown attack the Japanese Navy.1951: Mick Mars, guitarist for Motley Crue is born. Video is rated NSFW for hot rock chixx.
1953: Ernest Hemingway is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea. Was he gay? I honestly don't want to know.
1954: Pia Zadora is born. She got her first role as Girmar in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.1970: The Kent State shooting take place. One of the good thing to come out of the tragedy was a new understanding in how to handle not-really-all-that-peaceful protesters without having to resort to lethal force.
1972: The Don't Make A Wave Committee changes its name to Greenpeace.1988: The PEPCON Disaster takes place in Henderson, NV. PEPCON was one of the few manufacturers of ammonium perchlorate - the fuel used in the main booster of the Space Shuttle. After the Challenger disaster, shuttle missions were frozen, but the government never cancelled or changed their order with PEPCON. So, like Mickey's brooms in Fantasia, PEPCON kept churning out the stuff and storing it in plastic barrels in a nearby parking lot. 4000 tons of the stuff. One carelessly discarded cigarette later and that's it for PEPCON and the Kidd's Marshmellow Factory next door. Astonishingly, only two people lost their lives.
1989: Lt Col Oliver North is convicted of three charges, which are later overturned.
Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.
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