Today in History, 5/5

1260: Kublai Khan becomes emperor of the Mongol Empire.
1494: Christopher Columbus lands on Jamaica and claims it for Spain.
1640: King Charles I dissolves the Short Parliament. Charles liked operating without any Parliament at all, but he needed it to levy taxes and get money for wars. So, after eleven years without one, he called a Parliament and they promptly started bucking his authority. The whole thing lasted a little under a month.
1809: Mary Kies becomes the first woman awarded a US patent, for a technique of weaving silk with straw.1818: Karl Marx is born.1830: John Batterson Stetson, inventor of the hat that bears his name, is born.1862: Cinco de Mayo: Troops in Mexico led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla.
1864: Nellie Bly is born. She was an earlier crusading journalist who faked insanity and had herself committed to uncover abuses in institutions.1864: The Battle of the Wilderness begins in Spotsylvania, VA.1891: Carnegie Hall in New York has its grand opening.
1901: Blind Willie McTell, bluesman, is born.

1904: Cy Young pitches the first perfect game in the modern age of baseball.1914: Tyrone Power is born. Here's another scene from The Long Gray Line, one of my favorite movies.

1925: John T. Scopes is served an arrest warrant for teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act.1926: Ann B. Davis is born. She played Alice Nelson the housekeeper on The Brady Bunch.

1936: Italian troops occupy Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.
1940: Lance Henriksen is born. He seems destined to be a great actor in bad movies (Pumpkinhead, for example) but he's also done great stuff like Aliens and the TV series Millennium. Here he is as the evil biker guy selling "P2P" in the just terrible Stone Cold.

1941: Emperor Haile Selassie returns to Addis Ababa, a date which is known as Liberation Day.1942: Marc Alaimo is born. He is best known for playing the wicked (and crazy) Gul Dukat on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.1942: Tammy Wynette is born.

1943: Michael Palin is born.

1944: John Rhys-Davies is born. He's got the same kind of taste in movie roles as Lance Henriksen. Here he is in the Dungeon Siege movie. I didn't even know there was a Dungeon Siege movie. (Dungeon Siege is a video game and movies made from video games are almost never good).

1945: The Mauthausen concentration camp is liberated.
1945: Admiral Karl Donitz, leader of Germany after Hitler's death, orders all U-boats to cease operations and return to base.1945: Bob Seger is born.

1945: In the only fatal attack of its kind during WWII, a Japanese balloon bomb explodes on Gearheart Mountain, OR, killing a family of six who were having a picnic.1955: West Germany gains full sovereignty.
1961: Aboard a Mercury-Redstone 3, Alan Sheppard becomes the first American to travel into space, making a sub-orbital flight of fifteen minutes.1970: Will Arnett is born. He played G.O.B. on the classic Arrested Development.

1992: 202 years after its submission, the 27th Amendment is ratified. It says, basically, that Congressional pay raises don't take effect until after the next election.

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.