Upcoming Events on the Calendar-May: http://www.umkc.edu/imc/may.htm
Monthly theme page for May: http://www.teacherplanet.com/calendar/calendar.php?op=cal&month=5&year=2005
May Resources available including Limerick and Family Day

May is Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Month

May is National Barbecue Month

May is National Hamburger Month

May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, a time to recognize the history and contributions of the diverse groups who originally emigrated from the Asia and Pacific Rim area to the United States.
"Asian-Pacific Heritage Month": http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/feature/asia/ provides information about the historical contributions of Asian & Pacific peoples in the U.S. & territories. It includes links to Pacific Islander heritage & Asian American heritage websites.
AFT Home-Human Rights & Community Relations: http://www.aft.org/human/resource/asianpacific/index.html

May as it's National Strawberry Month.
California Strawberry Commission: http://www.calstrawberry.com/
Educating About Agriculture: http://www.ageducate.org/

The month of May is Physical Fitness and Sports Month.
P.E. Central: http://www.pecentral.com
PELinks4u: http://www.pelinks4u.org/
AskERIC Physical Education Lesson Plans:
http://askeric.org/cgi-bin/lessons.cgi/Physical_Education
The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports: http://www.fitness.gov
The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (PCPFS) serves as a catalyst to promote, encourage and motivate Americans of all ages to become physically active and participate in sports. They place a special emphasis on programs to help our nation's youth lay the foundation for active and fit lives. The PCPFS believes that physical activity and fitness offers important health benefits. And, just as important, they recognize the fact that sports and participating in sport activities help individuals develop character, discipline, confidence, self- esteem, and a sense of well-being.

May is Bicycle Safety Month
National Bike Safety Month provides an opportunity for local communities to promote bicycling as an environmentally-friendly transportation, personal wellness exercise-vehicle, and a fun recreational activity.
National Bicycle Safety Network: http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/bike/month.htm
Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute: http://www.helmets.org
South Dakota Department of Health - Bike Safety: http://www.state.sd.us/doh/Famhlth/bike.htm
NHTSA's Bike Safety Tips & Tour:
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/outreach/KidsPage/biketour/index.html

Space Day is celebrated each year on the first Thursday in May.

MOTHER'S DAY
The earliest Mother's Day celebrations can be traced back to the spring celebrations of ancient Greece in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods and to the offerings ancient Romans made to their Great Mother of Gods, Cybele.
England's "Mothering Sunday" was celebrated by young men and women who were apprentices or servants returning home on Mothering Sunday, bringing thier mothers small gifts and trinkets or a mothering cake.
In the United States Mother's Day was first suggested by Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, in 1872 as a day dedicated to peace. Ms. Howe organized Mothers Day meetings in Boston every year.
In 1907, a Philadelphia schoolteacher from West Virginia named Anna Jarvis, began a campaign to establish a national Mother's Day. Miss Jarvis was very close to her mother and by all accounts was an exemplary daughter. However, when Anna's mother passed away on May 9, 1905 she felt an over-whelming sense of guilt about all the things she felt like she should have done for her mother but never did. This over-whelming sense of guilt was the driving force behind Miss Jarvis' idea to honor her Mother. So, on May 10, 1908, three years after her Mother's death, the first unofficial Mother's Day celebration was held at the church where Anna's Mother had taught. Spurred by the positive response to the celebration Miss Jarvis started what some say is one of the most successful letter writing campaigns in history. She wrote authors, ministers, politicians and business leaders, anyone that could aid in getting her message out.
Soon after her letter writing campaign was in full swing the House of Representatives passed a Mother's Day resolution. However, it took several more years of campaigning before the resolution finally made it through the Senate in 1914. On May 8, 1914 Miss Jarvis' campaign
finally came to a conclusion as President Woodrow Wilson signed the Mother's Day proclamation which set aside the second Sunday of May as the official holiday.
*Billy Bear's Happy Mother's Day: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/mother/mom.htm
Gifts to print, color and cut; postcards to send; and certificates to fill out. There is a printable Photo House picture frame that can be colored and filled with family photos, and the Promise Booklet of coupons to relieve Mom of her daily chores. Other electronic gifts include Happy Mother's Day wallpaper and screensavers.
*BlackDog's Mother's Day Celebration: http://blackdog4kids.com/holiday/mom/index.html
*ChildFun Family Website: Activities for Kids - Mother's Day: http://childfun.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=585
*Mother's Day: http://www.lessonplanspage.com/MothersDay.htm
*Mom's Day Fun at Kids Domain: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/mom/index.html
*Mother's Day Poem or Letter: http://abcteach.com/MonthtoMonth/May/MOM.htm
*Mother's Day on the Net: http://www.holidays.net/mother/
*Mother's Day Quotations: http://daycare.about.com/parenting/daycare/blmomday.htm
*Picture Frame: Glue together 4 popcicle sticks for a frame. Then have students glue buttons around the edges. Type "Cute as Button!' for the frame and put their picture on the inside. Put peel and stick magnets on the back.
*U.S. Census Bureau Facts for Features-Mothers Day 2003:
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2003/cb03-ff07.html
*Who Came Up with Mother's Day and Why?: http://www.howstuffworks.com/question634.htm

Armed Forces Day
Armed Forces Day is celebrated annually on the third Saturday of May. Armed Forces Week begins on the second Saturday of May and ends on the third Sunday of May, the day after Armed Forces Day. Because of their unique training schedules, National Guard and Reserve units may celebrate Armed Forces Day/Week over any period in May.

MEMORIAL DAY
Memorial Day in the United States began as Decoration Day or Declaration Day, a day to honor those who served in the Civil War. Flowers and flags were used to decorate the graves of those who had fallen. The day was officially claimed on May 5, 1868 by General John Logan, National Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic. This holiday was celebrated on May 30 from 1868 until 1971 when the 4th Monday of May was made the official day of observance.
Memorial Day: http://www.jeannepasero.com/memorial.html
Reach Every Child-Honor those lost during war: http://www.reacheverychild.com/feature/memorial_day.html
ALL ABOUT MEMORIAL DAY: http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-5715.html
Here's a printable information and coloring sheet to help you out with celebrating Memorial Day in the primary classroom. It includes background info by way of telling what it is that people do on this special American holiday.
PATRIOTIC PINWHEEL: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/pinwheel/
Celebrate Memorial Day or get a headstart on the 4th of July with these simple but stunning pinwheels. All you need for materials are paper, pushpins, pencils, and markers.
MEMORIAL DAY WORKSHEET: http://www.teachervision.com/tv/printables/0876283059_182.pdf
This student worksheet was specifically designed for elementary classroom use in understanding the significance of Memorial Day. Students will complete word matches, fill in the blanks, and look up related vocabulary words.
ThinkQuest: Arlington National Cemetery: http://library.thinkquest.org/2901/
The Flag of the United States of America: http://www.usflag.org/
U.S. Memorial Day History and Information on U.S. War Memorials: http://www.usmemorialday.org/
UNITED STATES MEMORIAL DAY:
http://www.usmemorialday.org/
Celebrate Holidays in the USA: Memorial Day: http://www.usis.usemb.se/Holidays/celebrate/memorial.html
Memorial Day: http://www.patriotism.org/memorial_day/index.html
The history of the Memorial Day holiday is covered, along with war memorials, poetry, and speeches, and other information you might wish to research for classroom use on this national day of observance. There is a lesson plan section where middle to high school students create historical timelines and develop multimedia and written presentations on the background and responses to Memorial Day topics.
SEQUIN FLAG MAGNET: http://www.makingfriends.com/flag_sequin.htm
A fairly simple craft, it nevertheless glitters as a great project for showing patriotism.

May 1
May 1 is Space Day
"As the nation prepares to commemorate the Centennial of Flight in the coming year, Space Day 2003SM…Celebrating the Future of Flight will honor the past 100 years of aviation and aerospace accomplishments while seeking to inspire the next generation of inventors, innovators, aviators, and dreamers,” notes the Space Day website: www.spaceday.com. Each year, schools, museums, and other organizations participate in hundreds of local Space Day events. Consult the website to find out what's happening in your area. The Teacher's Space portion of the website provides lesson plans, links to other space-related sites for educators, a discussion board, and information on the May 1 Cyber Space Day webcast and the free Student Signatures in Space program for elementary students. Students can access the Mission: Fun section of the website for space-related games and activities.
May 1 is Law Day
Law Day-May 1: http://www.abanet.org/publiced/lawday/home.html
The American Bar Association has produced "Law Day Planning Guide" which can be downloaded and features a range of school outreach ideas, activities, lessons and sample program ideas.
May 1 is Mother Goose Day.
May 1 is National Teacher Day.
May 1 is Teen Day, an annual event that was started in 1999 by the West Hartford Public Library in Connecticut and proclaimed as such by the Connecticut State Legislature. Teen Day is aimed at creating beneficial dialogue between teenagers and adults and establishing and celebrating positive aspects of teen life and their contributions to the community. For more information about Teen Day, contact Veronica D. Esposito, Teen Services Librarian, West Hartford Public Library at (860)570-3777 or send e-mail to ronnie@connect.crlc.org.
-1672: English essayist, poet and dramatist Joseph Addison, born in Milston, England (1672). He and a man named Richard Steele published a daily periodical called the The Spectator, to which they both contributed essays. He is known for introducing ordinary, easy-to-understand language into the English essay.
-1769: Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington was born. 
-1830: American labor leader Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was born. 
-1855: Nationally known feminist Lucy Stone married Henry Blackwell. The word "obey" was omitted from their wedding vows. 
-1893: President Grover Cleveland opened the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. 
-1896: U.S. Gen. Mark Clark was born. 
-1898: During the Spanish-American war, Adm. George Dewey routed the Spanish fleet in the Philippines. 
-1901: Poet and literary critic Sterling Allen Brown was born in Washington, D.C. One of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, he wrote books analyzing African American culture like The Negro in American Fiction (1937).
-1908: Italian-American writer Niccolo Tucci was born in Lugano, Switzerland. He worked during World War II writing propaganda for Mussolini, and he later described the job as, "Wasting the best years of my life serving and praising one of the greatest imbeciles and criminals of the century." After the war, he came to the United States and began publishing fiction in the New Yorker magazine. He is the author of the novel Unfinished Funeral (1964) and the collection of stories The Rain Came Last (1990).
-1909: Singer Kate Smith was born. 
-1916: Actor Glenn Ford was born. 
-1918: Television personality Jack Paar was born.   
-1923: Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. He flew bomber missions during World War II, and most of his targets were bridges, but he once had to bomb a village, and that made him uncomfortable. He always felt a little guilty in between missions, sitting around while his friends were out risking their lives, but one of his tent mates had a typewriter, so he started writing stories to pass the time. About ten years after the war he began to write Catch 22 (1961). The novel is about a World War II bomber pilot named Yossarian, and it begins with him in the military hospital. Yossarian tries to get himself declared insane so he can stop flying bombing missions. Unfortunately, there is a regulation called Catch-22, stating that if you want out of combat duty you aren't crazy. Heller wrote, "[A pilot] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to." Catch 22 got mixed reviews, but it became a great favorite during the 1960's and is now considered one of the most important novels of the 20th Century. The phrase "Catch-22," is now a part of the American lexicon, defined by one edition of the Oxford English Dictionary as "a condition or consequence that precludes success, a dilemma where the victim cannot win."  
-1924: Novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern wasborn in Alvarado, Texas. He co-wrote the screenplays for the films Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Easy Rider (1969). While living in Paris after serving in World War II, he co-wrote the novel Candy (1958), an erotic retelling of Voltaire's Candide, about a young, upstanding, Christian woman who can't seem to resist the advances of any man she bumps into. It was one of the only novels written in English ever banned in France.
-1925: Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter was born. 
-1929: Singer Sonny James was born.  
-1931: The Empire State Building opened to the public. In Washington, D.C., President Herbert Hoover took a break from a cabinet meeting to flick a switch and, like a lit Christmas tree, the lights went on in the building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street in New York City. It was built remarkably fast, in just over a year. At 102 stories, it was the tallest building in the world until 1974. Passers-by often stood in crowds around the construction site, watching the steelworkers, who looked like trapeze artists, they were so high above the city.
-1939: Judy Collins was born. 
-1940: Novelist and short story writer Bobbie Ann Mason wasborn in Mayfield, Kentucky. She is the author of several books of fiction about her native western Kentucky, including Love Life: Stories (1989) and the novel Feather Crowns (1993).
-1945: Rita Coolidge was born. 
-1960: The Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers, who was captured. 
-1967: Tim McGraw was born.
-1971: Amtrak, the national passenger rail service that combined the operations of 18 passenger railroads, went into service. 
-1992: President Bush ordered 4,000 military troops into the riot-ravaged streets of Los Angeles. 
-1993: Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa and others in his entourage were killed in a suicide bomb blast. 
-1997: 18 years of Conservative Party rule in Great Britain ended with a Labor Party victory in elections, which allowed party leader Tony Blair to succeed John Majors as prime minister. 
-1999: Charismatic, a 31-1 long shot, won the 125th Kentucky Derby in Louisville. It was the third highest payoff in Derby history. 
-2000: Time Warner yanked ABC-owned TV channels from several of its cable systems in a dispute about payments with Disney, which owns ABC. Public outrage forced Time Warner to restore the network's signal a day later.

May 2
National Day of Prayer
-1729: one of the most famous monarchs in history, Russian Empress Catherine the Great was born Sophie Auguste Friederike in the Prussian province of Pomerania, now part of Poland. When she was fifteen she was married to the 16-year-old Grand Duke Peter, heir to the Russian throne. He was a sickly youth who played with toy soldiers, and Catherine was bored and miserable. She had many affairs, and she later hinted that her husband hadn't fathered any of her three children. Peter became Czar in 1761 when his aunt Elizabeth died, and he immediately began to offend the Russian people by refusing to mourn the dead empress, whom he had hated. The country began to sink into chaos, and at the end of June 1762, Catherine conspired with the army to have her husband arrested, and he died in a scuffle with his guards. In order to show that she now led their country, Catherine borrowed an old green army uniform, and rode out to meet her soldiers on a white horse. They wept and cheered at the sight of her. As the ruler of Russia, she encouraged the humanities, helping to promote book publishing, journalism, architecture, and the theater. She sponsored the first school for girls in Russia and established a system of elementary schools, all of which led to Russia becoming one of the most important cultural centers in Europe.
Catherine and Peter: The Odd Couple: http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/catherine_one/
-1859: English author and dramatist Jerome K. Jerome was born in Walsall, England. He wrote many books, including The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), but he is best known for his humorous play Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889).
-1860: Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest, Hungary. He was the founder of modern political Zionism, which gave birth to the nation of Israel. In 1894, as a Paris correspondent for a Vienna newspaper, he covered the treason trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army. The display of anti-Semitism he witnessed at the trial convinced him that Jews had to leave Europe and start their own country. He helped found the World Zionist Organization, but he died after the Zionist Congress rejected a British offer of land for Jewish settlement in East Africa. His body was eventually taken to Israel, where Mount Herzl near Jerusalem was established as a tribute to his memory.
-1863: An established 2,543 African American and white civil rights demonstrators protesting segregation were arrested and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama.
-1895: Lyricist Lorenz Hart was born in New York City. He wrote the lyrics to songs like "Blue Moon," (1934) "My Funny Valentine," (1937) and "The Lady Is a Tramp" (1937). Hart wrote verse in his spare time and was drifting around in his twenties when someone introduced him to Richard Rodgers, a teenage composer who wanted a lyricist. Their show The Garrick Gaieties (1925) became a huge success. Hart and Rodgers fought all the time. Hart often accused Rodgers of encouraging the orchestra to drown out his lyrics. Rodgers replied, "Do you want the audience to go out whistling the lyrics?" Hart didn't like working hard, keeping appointments, or meeting deadlines, and Rodgers called him "a partner, a best friend -- and a source of permanent irritation."
-1903: Dr. Benjamin Spock was born in New Haven, Connecticut.. His Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) was a bestseller during the period after World War II, when parents across America were raising the baby-boom generation. In 1943, having observed children and their health for ten years, Spock decided to write a book about taking care of them. Previous parenting guidebooks had encouraged parents to be stern with their children, and they were written as a list of commends. Dr. Spock not only encouraged parents to be affectionate, he also encouraged them to follow their own instincts. The first sentence of his book was, "You know more than you think you do."
Dr. Benjamin Spock, 1903-1998: http://www.drspock.com/about/drbenjaminspock/0,1781,,00.html
-1963: Children as young as six or seven set out with their older brothers and sisters for a demonstration against the segregationist policies of this deeply divided southern city.   In the early 60’s, Birmingham, Alabama, was the Klu Klux Klan country. Its police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, was dedicated to preserving the color line.  A black couple had been beaten for trying to enroll their children in a whites-only school. The city chose to close its library, parks and pools rather than comply with court-ordered desegregation.   Dr. King’s efforts to change the status quo were going nowhere in the spring of ‘63.  Negotiations and demonstrations were met with resistance; at one point King and other civil rights leaders were jailed. After their release they planned a non-violent young peoples’ march intended to build support in Birmingham’s black community and the nation at large for the fight for freedom.   Bull Connor responded with violence.

May 3
May 3-9 is Cartoon Appreciation Week. May 5, in particular, is Cartoonists Day, established by the National Cartoonists Society to commemorate the first successful Sunday color newspaper cartoon feature with a continuing character: "Down Hogan's Alley," starring the Yellow Kid, in the New York World in 1895.
-1469: Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli was born in Florence. He was a statesman and ambassador, but in 1513 he was accused of conspiring against the government. He was thrown into prison and tortured, but he never admitted his guilt. When the government finally released him, he went into exile, and wrote a book called The Prince (1532), in which he described how an ideal ruler should accept that he lives in an immoral world, and use whatever means he could to secure order in his country. He wrote, "Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking."
Niccolo Machiavelli-Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher: http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96may/machiavelli.html
1903: Actor Bing Crosby was born Harry Lillis Crosby in Tacoma, Washington. He starred in a series of musicals in the 1930's, but many critics think his best performances are in the road movies he made in the 1940's with his golf-buddy Bob Hope, including Road to Morocco (1942). In 1944, a director asked him to play a priest in an upcoming film, but Crosby, a devout Catholic, thought that playing a man of the cloth would be bad taste. The director insisted, and Crosby ended up winning an Academy Award for his performance in the movie Going My Way (1944). After he starred in the musical White Christmas (1954), the title song became his trademark, and he sang it on television almost every holiday season.
Bing Crosby: http://www.kcmetro.cc.mo.us/pennvalley/biology/lewis/crosby/bing.htm
-1912: Poet, novelist and essayist May Sarton, born Eléanore Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium. Sarton published many novels in her lifetime, including Faithful Are the Wounds (1955) and collections of poetry like A Private Mythology (1966). But she is perhaps best known for her published journals, including Journal of a Solitude (1973). She wrote, "These are not hours of fire but years of praise,/The glass full to the brim, completely full,/But held in balance so no drop can spill."
-1919: Folk singer Pete Seeger was born in New York City. His mother was a violinist and his father was a musicologist. As a teenager he rebelled against his parents' love of music, and decided he wanted to be a painter. But the first time he heard the sound of a banjo at the Folk Song and Dance Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, he fell in love with folk music and dropped out of Harvard.
-1926: The "Godfather of Soul" James Brown, born in a one-room shack in the pinewoods of Barnwell, South Carolina (1928). His family gave him up for dead after his delivery, because he wasn't breathing or moving, but his aunt Minnie picked him up and blew into his mouth, and he screamed for the first time. As a singer, he became known for his scream. He also developed a sequence in his live performance, in which he collapsed to the floor exhausted, but as members of his band helped him off the stage, he suddenly threw off their arms, as though he'd been resurrected, and continued on with the show. He began a recording career with a song called "Please Please Please" (1956). It was a huge hit, and went to number six on the R & B charts. He went on to record such songs as "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (1965) and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" (1965).
James Brown Homepage: http://www.funky-stuff.com/jamesbrown/
-1952: The first aircraft landed on the North Pole, piloted by Lt.Col. J.O. Fletcher Lt.Col. William P. Benedict.

May 4
-1796: Horace Mann was born in Franklin, Massachusetts. He was the first great American advocate of public education. He believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal.
Horace Mann: http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/agexed/aee501/mann.html
-1825: Thomas Henry Huxley was born in Ealing, England. The grandfather of Aldous Huxley, Thomas was an English biologist and educator. He coined the word "agnostic." His strong public support of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution earned him the nickname "Darwin's bulldog."
Thomas Huxley: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/thuxley.html
-1886: The Haymarket Square Riot broke out in Chicago. The day before, on May 3rd, police had shot several lumber workers, killing one of them, after a strike at the McCormick lumber plant turned violent. To protest the police actions, a second demonstration was held in Haymarket Square on May 4th. It was a peaceful demonstration, attended by the mayor and about 1500 men, and after it started to rain, most of the crowd went home. The final speaker, a man named Samuel Fielden, was about to finish his speech when the police arrived and demanded that the crowd disperse. Fielding shouted, "We are peaceable," and suddenly a bomb flew through the air, trailing sparks. It struck the ground near the police and exploded, killing seven policemen. The surviving policemen attacked the crowd with their clubs and pistols. The identity of the bomber was never proven. Thirty-one prominent labor leaders were arrested, eight were convicted of having planned the bombing, and four were hanged, with almost no proof. Among the men hanged was August Spies, who shouted from the gallows, "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you hear today!"
Chicago: 1886 the Hay Market Riot: http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/timeline/haymarket.html
-1928: Irish poet Thomas Kinsella was born in Dublin. He's the author of many books of poetry, including Notes from the Land of the Dead (1972) and Blood and Family (1989).
-1939: Israeli novelist Amos Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem. As a child he watched Israel become a nation. In 1948 he filled sandbags along with other schoolchildren in preparation for the siege of Jewish Jerusalem in the War of Independence. He left home at fifteen against his father's wishes to become a peasant-soldier on a kibbutz, and he changed his last name to Oz, which means strength in Hebrew. He has written many novels, including My Michael (1968) and The Same Sea (2001).
New York State Writer's Institute-Amos Oz: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/oz.html
Thomas Kinsella: http://www.irishwriters-online.com/thomaskinsella.html
-1956: Novelist and short story writer David Guterson was born in Seattle, Washington. He worked for many years as a high school teacher, and the two books he always assigned were Romeo and Juliet and To Kill A Mockingbird. When he wrote his first novel, he combined the story of star-crossed lovers with a courtroom drama about race. The novel was Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), about the murder trial of a Japanese-American in the wake of World War II, and it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
David Guterson: http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/snow/guterson.html
-1961: Thirteen Freedom riders began bus trip through South.

May 5
-1813: Philosopher Søren (Aabye) Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen. He was a recluse. He lived on an inheritance and used it to publish his books, many of them under pseudonyms: Either/Or (1843), Philosophical Fragments (1844), Works of Love (1847). He was a big influence on writers such as Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus. He said, "The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you."
Søren Kierkegaard: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
-1818: Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany. With his friend Frederich Engels he wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848), and Das Kapital (1867), in which he predicted a revolution where the working class would overthrow capitalism and its supporters. His radical ideas got him into trouble wherever he went, and kept him moving around Europe. When he was 24 he edited a newspaper in Cologne, Germany, but he got into trouble with the censors and moved to Paris to escape arrest. He was expelled twice from Paris and once from Belgium. He settled in London and lived the rest of his life in exile from his home country. Marx's family lived in horrible poverty while he spent his days studying in the library. The children learned to lie to the creditors. "Mr. Marx ain't upstairs," they'd say.
Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/
-1862: The Battle of Puebla in Mexico. This day is now known as Cinco De Mayo.
Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday marking the defeat of French invaders at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. The Mexicans were ill-equipped and outnumbered two to one, but they caused 1,000 French casualties and forced a retreat to the Gulf Coast. The city was renamed Puebla de Zaragoza after the Mexican general that led the effort.
CINCO DE MAYO HISTORY: http://www.vivacincodemayo.org/history.htm
PAPER BAG PONCHO: http://www.kinderart.com/multic/poncho.htm
Background Cinco de Mayo information is included along with directions for making a paper poncho.
CINCO DE MAYO CRAFTS: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/9087/cinco/carts.html
Make some maracas or pinatas with the instructions at this site to help your class get in a festive
mood for Cinco de Mayo.
-1903: James Beard, a great food writer and food lover was born in Portland, Oregon. He was enormous, flamboyant, and fun-loving. He was a champion of American cooking. He trained three generations of American cooks, encouraged simple American ingredients, and spearheaded a culinary revolution in this country. Julia Child said, "In the beginning was James Beard." He wrote 23 cookbooks and many of them became classics, including the first serious work on outdoor cooking, Cook it Outdoors (1942); The Fireside Cookbook (1949); and Beard on Bread (1973). The James Beard Cookbook (1959) was the first best-selling paperback cookbook -- it told the cook everything, even how to boil water, and on the day of its publication stores and newsstands in New York immediately sold out of it. He said, "I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around." He also said, "I don't like gourmet cooking or 'this' cooking or 'that' cooking. I like good cooking."
-1961: the first U. S. astronaut to go into space, Alan Shepard Jr, went up but did not orbit.  His space craft was the Mercury Freedom 7.

May 6
-1626: Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island from the Algonquin Indians for two boxes of hatchets, beads, and pots worth sixty silver guilders, about one hundred dollars.
Peter Minuit: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAminuit.htm
-1841: The British Postal Service first issued their "black penny" stamp, the first postage stamp anywhere. The idea quickly caught on and stamps are now used all over the world and have even become collectible items for some.
-1856: Sigmund Freud, Austrian physician and psychoanalyst, was born Sigismund Shlomo Freud, in what is now Pribor, Czechoslovakia. He's the founder of psychoanalysis. In 1899 he published his masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams. He argued that dreams were the fulfillment of our wishes, and that neuroses could be traced back to repressed childhood experiences and desires. He's responsible for everyday phrases like, "You're being defensive," and "You're rationalizing," and for the "Freudian slip." His son said, "I didn't know the full facts of life until I was 17. My father never talked about his work." He wrote, "I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think."
Freud Museum London: http://www.freud.org.uk/
-1868: Writer Gaston Leroux was born in Paris, France. He's best known for his novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910). Phantom is about a hideous singer who haunts the cellars and corridors of the Paris Opera House and becomes the masked lover of a beautiful young understudy. The novel was not very successful, but the story was filmed five times, and the stage musical has sold over 100 million tickets for $3.2 billion.
-1914: Poet and critic Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee. In his critical essays, collected and published as Poetry and the Age (1953), he revitalized the reputations of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. His best-known poem is the "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner."
Randall Jarrell: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=9
-1915: Director, actor, and screenwriter Orson Welles was born. He was conceived in Paris, named in Rio de Janeiro, but born, to his disappointment, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a place he thought held less cache. He was called a child prodigy. He got his start as an actor on the Dublin stage. He starred on Broadway at 19 and formed his own theater at 21. In 1938, his Mercury Theatre on the Air adapted H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds for a CBS radio show. It was so realistic that it caused panic all over the country. It started out with live dance music, but then an announcer broke in with news flashes about "a huge flaming object," a Martian invasion near the town of Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The New York Times reported that in one hospital in New Jersey, fifteen people were treated for shock and hysteria. In Newark, more than twenty families on one block rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to run from the poison gas. Lawsuits were threatened and Welles apologized, but in fact he was delighted. At age 23, he'd become a household name. When he was just 25, Welles made his first movie, Citizen Kane (1941), one of the most influential films in history. Welles never did have a box-office hit, and ended his career in exile from Hollywood. Kane was the best movie he ever made.

May 7
-1189: Barbarossa granted customs and commercial rights to the German town of Hamburg.
-1824: Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor was performed for the first time in Vienna, Austria.
-1832: As a result of the Greek War for Independence, German Prince Otto of Wittlesbach became Otto I, King of Greece. Under Otto's rule, Greece became the first region of the Ottoman Empire to become independent. Otto was highly unpopular due, in part, to his autocratic rule and failure to create a dynasty, and was deposed in 1862.  A painting of King Otto's expulsion: http://www.culture.gr/4/42/421/42103/42103e/00/l421ce3o.jpg
-1833: Johannes Brahms, German composer, was born.
-1915 A German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania; an act that contributed to the entry of the United States into World War I.  More than 1,100 passengers and crew perished. There has been controversy over the cargo as some believe the Lusitania was carrying munitions intended to help the Allied forces. This would have been illegal given the ship's civilian mission.   A photograph and history of the Lusitania: http://anakin.aic.co.uk/~mburland/ships/lusitania/
-1954 Viet Minh's troops defeated the French army in the Dien Bien Phu Battle.

May 8
-1541: Expolorer Hernando de Soto encountered the Mississippi River.
-1792: President George Washington authorized the mint of the first US copper coins.
-1794: Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was decapitated in Paris for his former role as tax collector.
-1884: Harry S. Truman was born.
-1942: The Battle of the Coral Sea, between U.S. and Japanese ships, ended.  This battle introduced a new form of naval warfare in which opposing ships never faced each other directly; the entire battle was waged by aircraft. Strategically, the U.S. was victorious, as Japanese forces were prevented from expanding into the Pacific.   During the battle the warring ships never came within visual contact:
http://iol.net.au/~conway/ww2/coralsea.html
-1973: A 71-day siege at Wounded Knee in South Dakota ended when members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) surrendered. In an effort to bring attention to the plight of Native Americans at Wounded Knee, one of the poorest communities in the U.S., AIM members took hostage 11 people there. The siege ended after U.S. Senate officials promised to investigate their complaints.  AIM founder Russell Means was one of the leaders of the siege: http://www.russellmeans.com/

May 9:
-1800: John Brown, American abolitionist, was born.

May 10
-1775: Fort Ticonderoga Day, anniversay of the battle fought there.
-1843: Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós was born in Las Palmas, Grand Canary Island (1843). He was called the greatest Spanish novelist since Miguel de Cervantes. He wrote 77 novels and 21 plays. Forty-six of his novels form a series called National Episodes (1873-1912), which retells Spain's history in the 1800's. Galdos used memoirs, old newspaper articles, and eyewitness accounts to write about historical events as they might have appeared to the people that lived through them.
-1869: Gold Spike Day commermorates the meeting of the Union and Central Pacific Railroads with the driving of a golden spike. The first transcontinental railroad was finished when the last "Golden Spike" was tapped into place at Promontory Point in Utah Territory. It took six and a half years to link the two coasts with 1,800 miles of track.
-1899: Fred Astaire was born Frederick Austerlitz, in Omaha, Nebraska. He made dancing look effortless on screen and stage, and the writer John O'Hara called him the "living symbol of all that is the best of show business." He's famous for the movies he made with his dancing partner Ginger Rogers: classics like The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), and Swing Time (1936). They rubbed off on each another. People said she gave him sex appeal, and he gave her class. Their only on-screen kiss came in the movie Carefree (1938), in a dream sequence. He was a perfectionist who worked up to 18 hours a day. He said, "The only way I know to get a good show is to practice, sweat, rehearse, and worry." He demanded the same of his partners. He said, "The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style."
FredAstaire.Net: http://www.fredastaire.net/menu.htm
-1994: Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the first black president of South Africa. He had spent 27 years of his life as a political prisoner of the South African government. He spent the first 18 of those 27 years in a small cell without a bed or plumbing. He was forced to do hard labor in a quarry. He could write and receive a letter once every six months, and once a year he was allowed to meet with a visitor for 30 minutes. In his inauguration speech he said, "the time for the healing of the wounds has come." As president, Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights violations under apartheid, and in 1996 he presided over the enactment of the new South African constitution.
Biography of Nelson Mandela: http://www.anc.org.za/people/mandela.html

May 11
Fire Service Recognition Day
-1858: Minnesota was admitted into the Union.
-1896: Mari Sandoz was born near Hay Springs, Nebraska. The frontier life prepared her to write realistic books about pioneers and Indians, books like Crazy Horse (1942), a biography of the Sioux Indian chief; The Buffalo Hunters (1954); and The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1966). She was a meticulous researcher. She wanted to see firsthand the places she wrote about -- the routes, camps, and battlefields of the Sioux, and Cheyenne. She visited reservations, slept in tents, and conducted interviews with Indians in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Sandoz used her research in books like Cheyenne Autumn (1953) and These Were the Sioux (1961).
Mari Sandoz: http://www.gordoncitylibrary.org/mari.htm
-1888: Irving Berlin was born Israel Baline, in Russia. He came to New York City with his family when he was five. When his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy," (1907) was published, a printer's error called him Irving Berlin, and he kept the name. He went on to write more 1,500 songs, including a long list of classics like "Blue Skies," "Puttin' on the Ritz," "God Bless America," and "There's No Business Like Show Business." He said, "The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success." He made more money from royalties than any other songwriter in history, and he guarded his copyrights fiercely. He wrote the holiday anthems ''White Christmas'' and ''Easter Parade.'' He wrote ''Something to Be Thankful For" for Thanksgiving, "Say It With Firecrackers" for the Fourth of July, ''A Little Bit of Irish,'' for St. Patrick's Day, ''Let's Start the New Year Right'' for New Year's Eve, and ''I Can't Tell a Lie'' for Washington's Birthday. As a catchall, he wrote ''Happy Holiday.'' Irving Berlin, who said, "Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it."
Irving Berlin-A Brief Biography: http://www.nodanw.com/biographies/irving_berlin.htm
-1904: Salvador Dali, Catalan Spanish surrealist painter, was born.
-1981: Bob Marley, singer and composer, died of cancer at the age of 36.  With his group "The Wailers," Marley became one of the most popular and influential reggae musicians. Reggae is sometimes associated with Rastafarianism, a politico-religious movement that worships the
Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, under his pre-coronation name, Ras (Prince) Tafari.   More information about Bob Marley: http://www.fbnet.net/mary/bobmarley/bobbio.htm
-1997: Deep Blue v. Kasparov, IBM's super-computer Deep Blue made history by defeating
Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. It was the first time a reigning world champion had been bested in a match by a machine using tournament time controls.  Deep Blue and Kasparov played six games: the opening game was won by Kasparov, the second by Deep Blue, and the following three games were draws.

May 12
-1812: English nonsense poet Edward Lear was born in London. His first book of poems was called A Book of Nonsense (1846), and was filled with limericks and other snappy, silly poems. He was better known in his day for his landscape paintings and nature drawings than his poetry, and worked for the London Zoological Society illustrating birds.
Edward Lear (1812-1888): http://www.adh.brighton.ac.uk/schoolofdesign/MA.COURSE/01/LIALear.html May 12 is Limerick Day in honor of Edward Lear. The limerick dates from the early 18th century and is described as “the only fixed verse form indigenous to the English language.”
-1820: Florence Nightingale, English nurse and founder of modern nursing, was born.
-1828: Poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London to Italian exiles. He and his sister, poet Christina Rossetti, grew up drawing, painting, and writing poetry in both English and Italian. In 1851, he became engaged to Lizzie Siddal, but they weren't married until 1860. Lizzie died just two years after she and Rossetti were married, probably by suicide. Rossetti placed all of his unpublished poems in her coffin, only to dig them up a few years later so he could publish them.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882): http://www.artmagick.com/artists/rossetti.aspx
-1832: Gaetano Donizetti 's "L'Elisir d'amore" was first performed.
-1895: Philosophical writer and speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in Mandanapalle, South India. He said, "Your judgment, your mind, your affection, your life are being perverted by things which have no value, and herein lies sorrow."
Krishnamurti Foundation of America: http://www.kfa.org/
-1907: English detective writer Leslie Charteris was born in Singapore. He's famous for creating the Saint, a sharply-dressed hero who hunted down bad guys and used the names of different saints as pseudonyms. The Saint was introduced in the novel Enter the Saint (1930), and his adventures were portrayed in several movies and a television series starring Roger Moore in the 1960s. Charteris introduced his character, "I am the Saint -- you may have heard of me. Just a twentieth-century privateer. In my small way I try to put right a few of the things that are wrong with this cock-eyed world, and clean up some of the excrescences I come across."
-1921: Canadian writer of animal stories Farley Mowat was born in Belleville, Ontario. He was obsessed with animals as a child, and became an avid bird-watcher by the time he was fifteen years old. One evening, his parents were hosting a formal dinner party at their house when young Farley rushed into the room with a dead, dissected woodpecker on a plate, excited about an anatomical discovery he had made. One of the guests happened to work at the local newspaper and asked Farley if he would write a weekly column about birds in the paper's supplement for young readers. It was the beginning of his career as a writer.
Farley Mowat: http://www.ecobooks.com/mowat.htm
-1926: Norwegian Roald Amundsen, Italian Umberto Nobile, and American Lincoln Ellsworth crossed the North Pole in an airship, dropping flags from Norway, Italy, and the US. Some believe that they were actually the first ones to reach the North Pole, which would discredit the stories by Robert Peary and Richard Byrd that they had been the first to arrive there.  Roald Amundsen was also the first human to reach the South Pole: http://www.gonorway.no/go/amundsen.html
-1932: The body of Charles Lindbergh's son was found.
-1937: George VI was crowned King of England.
-1939: American novelist and poet Rosellen Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her novels include Tender Mercies (1978), Before and After (1992), and her latest, Half a Heart (2000), which tells the story of a white, Jewish woman who is reunited with the biracial daughter she abandoned during the sixties. She said, "I still write for the same reason I wrote when I was nine years old: to speak more perfectly than I really can, to a listener more perfect than any I know."
-1970: The US Senate confirmed Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court.  Blackmun was regarded as a strict conservative when he joined the nation's highest court, but that changed in 1973 when he supported a woman's right to a legal abortion. In the 1980s, he supported a separation between church and state, and often defended individual rights against governmental abuse.   Justice Blackmun was a staunch defender of civil rights: http://www.aclu.org/news/1999/n030499c.html

May 13
-1842: Arthur Seymour Sullivan wasborn in London. He began collaborating with William Gilbert in 1871, and the pair would go on to write fourteen enormously popular comic operas, including Trial by Jury (1875), The Mikado (1885), and The Pirates of Penzance (1879). After a string of successes, they had their own theatre built for them, the Savoy, where they premiered Patience (1881).
-1846: Congress declared war against Mexico.
-1882: Painter Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France. He painted scenes of villages where the buildings were reduced to their basic geometrical shape, the cube, and along with Pablo Picasso became a leader of Cubism. Georges Braque said: "There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain."
Georges Braque: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/braque.html
-1888: Lei Aurea Princess Isabel of Brazil signed the "Lei Aurea" (Golden Law) which abolished slavery. Slavery was ended in part to appease the efforts of abolitionists, but mostly because it was less expensive for employers to hire wageworkers than to keep slaves. Plantation owners opposed the law because they were not compensated for releasing their slaves.  The passage of the law hastened the fall of the Brazilian monarchy:  http://www.sercomtel.com.br/ice/brasil/slavery.html
-1907: The novelist who wrote Rebecca (1938), Daphne du Maurier, was born in London. She spent most of her adult life in the coastal town of Cornwall, known for its stormy, unpredictable weather. Her three most famous novels, Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1941), and Rebecca (1938), are all set in Cornwall. Rebecca is narrated by a young, nameless woman who marries a rich widower and lives in a mysterious house ruled by an odd housekeeper who remains devoted to the man's dead wife, Rebecca. Orson Welles dramatized Rebecca on a radio program in 1938, and two years later Alfred Hitchcock made it into a movie.
The Daphne du Maurier Web Site: http://www.dumaurier.org/
-1918 The "Inter-Allied Independent Bomber Force" of the Royal Air Force (RAF) was created.
-1937: Science fiction writer Roger Zelazny was born in Euclid, Ohio. He was part of science fiction's "New Wave" in the 1960s, a group of writers that focused on character development and psychology and thought that science fiction should be taken seriously as literature. He wrote over 150 short stories and 50 books, including Lords of Light (1967) and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969).
Roger Zelazny Page: http://zelazny.corrupt.net/
-1938: Louis Armstrong New Orleans's musician Louis Armstrong recorded a jazz version of the
religious song "When the Saints Go Marching In," making it extremely popular. Scotsman James M. Black composed the melody of the song, while the lyrics were written by Katherine E. Purvis.  Louis Armstrong was one of the greatest Jazz musicians of all time.
-1940: Travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England. One day he woke up half blind, and a doctor suggested that he stop looking at pictures and go to Africa with its wide horizons. He took the doctor's advice and soon left for the Sudan, where he journeyed on camel and foot through the hills of the Red Sea. He began writing a column for the London Times. For one of his articles, he went to see the ninety-three year-old architect Eileen Gray in Paris. When Chatwin saw that she had a map of Patagonia on her apartment wall, he said he had always wanted to go there. She said, "So have I. Go there for me." Chatwin left the next day, leaving a cable for the London Times that said, "Have Gone to Patagonia." He took a few provisions and during his time in Patagonia, a small area on the southern tip of South America, he collected the material for what would become his first book, In Patagonia (1977). His travel writings include Anatomy of Restlessness (1997) and What Am I Doing Here (1989), and his novels include Utz (1984) and The Songlines (1987).
Bruce Chatwin: http://www.brucechatwin.com/
-1944: Novelist Armistead Maupin was born Armistead Jones in Washington, D.C. He's famous for his Tales of the City series, which evolved from a regular column he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, beginning May 24, 1976. The novels focus on a group of gay and straight characters who share a boarding house in San Francisco.
Armistead Maupin: http://www.barclayagency.com/maupin.html
-1981: Pope John Paul II was shot twice at close range while riding in an open car at St. Peter's Square in Rome. A Turkish national, Mehmet Ali Agca, was arrested immediately and later convicted. Agca was a fugitive of the law for the murder of a Turkish journalist. The Pope was pronounced recovered after a three-month convalescent period.  Various images of John Paul II:   http://www.ampolinstitute.org/pope.html

May 14
-1607: Jamestown Day, anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in America.
-1686: Gaberiel Daniel Fahrenheit, German physicist who invented the Fahreneit temperature scale, was born.
-1727: Thomas Gainsborough, English portrait and landscape painter, was born.
-1796: To treat smallpox, English physician Edward Jenner inoculated eight-year old James Phipps with a small dose of cowpox.
-1973: Skylab was launched.
-1897: John Philip Sousa's march "The Stars and Stripes Forever" premiered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The occasion was the unveiling of a statue of George Washington. In 1985, a bill was introduced in Congress to make "The Stars and Stripes Forever" the official national march of the US.  The last piece played by Sousa before his death was "The Stars and Stripes Forever":  http://www.dws.org/sousa/about.htm
-1980: About 350 Salvadoran refugees were killed attempting to cross the Sumpul River from El Salvador to Honduras. According to a report by the United Nations Truth Commission, the refugees were killed by Salvadoran military units, the National Guard, and a death squad.   The same report stated that Honduran troops prevented the refugees from reaching Honduran soil.  Mario Bencastro discusses the civil war, including the event at Sumpul River, in "The Tree of Life: Stories of Civil War":
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558851860/thelearningkingd/104-6175147-2314838

May 15
-1811: Paraguay declared its independence from Spain and Argentina, a declaration that started on May 14th. Paraguay had depended on Buenos Aires since 1776 when the new Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata was created. Thus, when Argentina declared its independence in 1810, it sought unsuccessfully to retain Paraguay as an Argentinean province.  More on Paraguay's history: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/dest/sam/par.htm
-1856: Lyman Frank Baum, author of the books about the fictional land of Oz, was born in Chittenango, New York. His father was a rich oil tycoon, and the family lived at an idyllic country home in upstate New York. He was a shy and studious child. Frank had a heart condition his entire life and was never able to exert himself physically. He had a heart attack at school and returned home, where he turned his creativity toward writing and publishing. When he was fifteen years old his father bought him a small printing press for his birthday, and he and his brother Harry started a newspaper called The Rose Lawn Home Journal. His first book was published in 1886 and was called The Book of Hamburgs, A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of Different Varieties of Hamburgs. He wrote a couple of plays and toured around the country before settling down in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He ran a general store that he called "Baum's Bazaar," where, with a cigar constantly dangling from his mouth, he liked to entertain children by telling them fairy tales and giving them candy as they gathered around on the dusty, wooden sidewalk. In 1897, he published his collection of Mother Goose stories, Mother Goose in Prose. Two years later he met the illustrator William Denslow, and the pair published Father Goose, His Book (1899), a huge success. In 1900, Baum wrote the book that made him famous, The Wizard of Oz, illustrated by Denslow. The book began as a story he told to some neighborhood children; Frank thought it was so good that he stopped in the middle of the story to go start writing it down. The story of Dorothy, her dog Toto, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man, and their journey down the yellow brick road, was an instant classic. Baum was a socialist, and The Emerald City of Oz was his socialist utopia. He wrote, "There were no poor people in the land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. Each person was given freely by his neighbours whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire. Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do."
The Classical Library-Lyman Frank Baum: http://www.classicallibrary.org/baum/
-1890: Writer Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas. She wrote many essays and short stories, but she spent twenty years working on her only novel, The Ship of Fools, which made her famous when it was published in 1962. She said, "I finished the thing; but I think I sprained my soul." And, "I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction."
Katherine Anne Porter: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kaporter.htm
-1918: The first regularly scheduled airmail service took place.
-1930: Painter Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia. He is famous for his paintings of flags and maps in the '50s and '60s.
Jasper Johns: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/J/johnsbio.html
-1940: Nylon stockings were sold throughout the US for the first time.
-1963: Through a Proclamation issued by President John F. Kennedy, May 15th was designated as Peace Officer Memorial Day. Peace officers are civil servants, such as police agents, whose duty is to preserve the public peace. Between 1980 and 1998, 1,182 police officers were intentionally killed by means of a firearm.  In California, a memorial was erected to remember peace officers who have fallen in the line of duty: http://www.camemorial.org/photo.htm
-1972: Presidential candidate George Wallace was shot.

May 16
Feast day of St. Brendan, patron saint of sailors and travelers. St. Brendan was born near Tralee in County Kerry, Ireland. He traveled all around Ireland as a young man, and founded many monasteries. He also went to Scotland, Wales, and Brittany, to spread Christianity in those areas. In the middle ages a story called The Voyage of St. Brendan became popular; it told the tale of St. Brendan going on a long journey across the Atlantic in search of paradise. In the 1970s, a man named Tim Severin became obsessed with St. Brendan's story and built a boat similar to what Brendan must have sailed with. It was made of hides tanned with oak bark, sealed together with animal fat and grease. He sailed with a group of volunteers from the western coast of Ireland to Newfoundland, proving that Brendan's journey would have been possible. He published the story of his journey in the book The Brendan Voyage (2000).
Catholic Online-Saints-St. Brendan: http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=170
-1866: The US Treasury Department began minting the nickel.
-1888: German inventor Emile Berliner gave the first demonstration of flat disc recording and reproduction at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Unlike Edison's phonograph, which used
cylindrical records, Berliner's little hand-cranked technology played flat discs. The idea of a flat disc soon became popular in the US, Europe, India, China, and Japan.  A picture of a Berliner disc: http://www.proaxis.com/~settlet/record/articles/Berliner.html
-1912: Writer and Chicago radio personality Louis Studs Terkel was born in New York City. He went to law school in Chicago but decided to go into television, where he hosted a variety show. Later, he became a radio disc jockey for a fine arts station, and began to interview blues and jazz musicians and actors. In 1967 he published a book of interviews with immigrants in Chicago called Division Street: America, and has since published many more books of interviews including Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith (2001). In 1985, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of oral histories about World War II, The Good War.
Studs Terkel: http://www.citypaper.net/articles/123099/feat.20q.shtml
-1920: Joan of Arc was canonized by Pope Benedict XV.
-1929: The Academy Awards ceremony was held for the first time. American poet Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She's written over twenty collections, including The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955) and Diving into the Wreck (1973), and is known for her feminism and her politically charged poetry.
Adrienne Rich: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0305
-1975: Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei became the first woman to climb Mount Everest. After returning from the summit, she said, "Technique and ability alone do not get you to the top; it is the willpower that is the most important. This willpower you cannot buy with money or be given by others. It rises from your heart."  After Everest, Tabei continued to climb the highest mountains of each region:  http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses/enwr110/f99/12/junkobio.html

May 17
-1510: Renaissance painter Sandro Boticelli died today in Florence. While he received several commissions for work during his lifetime (including wall frescoes in the Sistine Chapel), it was not till centuries later that his talent was rediscovered and brought to light.
-1792: Twenty-four New York brokers signed an agreement to trade with one another and charge a uniform commission rate to their customers.   The New York Stock Exchange emerged from that agreement. According to legend, in good weather the brokers met beneath a Buttonwood tree, and in bad weather they met at a nearby coffee house.  More information about the NYSE:
http://www.nyse.com/about/about.html
-1803: English novelist Robert Smith Surtees was born in County Durham. He wrote humorous novels about the sporting life of British aristocrats in the nineteenth century. He was an avid foxhunter and edited The New Sporting Magazine for twenty-five years. In Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities (1838), he created the character of John Jorrocks the sporting grocer. Charles Dickens' publishers loved the character and the book and suggested to Dickens that he try writing something similar; the result was The Pickwick Papers (1837). Surtees said, "More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice."
-1814: Norwegian leaders adopted a national constitution.
-1873: English novelist Dorothy Miller Richardson was born in Abingdon, Berkshire, England. One of the first writers to use stream of consciousness, she wrote the thirteen volume autobiographical novel Pilgrimage (1938), which tells the life-story of a woman in early twentieth century Britain.
-1875: The first Kentucky Derby took place.
-1905: American screenwriter and playwright John Patrick was born John Patrick Goggan in Louisville, Kentucky. He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Teahouse of the August Moon (1954), about an American soldier who builds a teahouse in a small Okinawa village.
-1935: British writer Dennis Potter was born in Berry Hill, Gloucestershire, England. He wrote plays, movies, and novels, but started out writing challenging and innovative dramas for television, like Pennies from Heaven (1978), a musical about a depressed sheet music salesman during the Depression.
Dennis Potter: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dpotter.htm
-1939: Young adult novelist Gary Paulsen was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He's the author of dozens of books, including Canyons (1990), Woodsong (1990), and Hatchet (1988), about a fourteen-year-old boy who survives over fifty days in the northern wilderness. Paulson ran away from home when he was fourteen years old, and later worked on a farm, as an engineer, a ranch hand, a truck driver, and a sailor. He decided to be a writer while he was working as a satellite technician for an aerospace firm in California. He drove off to northern Minnesota, rented a cabin on a lake, and wrote his first novel while living off his own vegetable gardens.
Gary Paulsen: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/garypaulsen/
-1954: The unanimous US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.
-1987: An Iraqi warplane fired two Exocet missiles at the U.S. Navy frigate Stark in 1987. Thirty-seven sailors lost their lives while another twenty-one were wounded. Saddam Hussein issued a formal apology claiming the attack was a mistake due to pilot error.   A picture of USS Stark (FFG-31): http://www.spear.navy.mil/ships/FFG31P.GIF

May 18
-1048: Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur, Khurasan, Iran. When he was alive, he was famous for his scientific and mathematical achievements, which included a study of Euclid's definitions and extensive work on music and algebra. It wasn't until English poet Edward Fitzgerald translated his fragments of poetry into one great coherent work called the Rubaiyat that Khayyam became known as a poet. The poem encourages us to live life to the fullest and includes lines like "The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on."
Omar Khayyam: http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/%7Ehistory/Mathematicians/Khayyam.html
-1291: Acre, the last major Christian stronghold in what is today Israel, was captured by Muslim troops. Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil, son of Qalawun, led troops from Egypt and Syria to isolate Acre. After several weeks of siege, the city was finally occupied by the sultan's troops.1804 Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of France.
-1872: British philosopher Bertrand Russell was born in Trelleck, Monmouthshire, England. He wrote about mathematics, logic, ethics, and social issues, and was one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century. He emerged as an important philosopher with The Principles of Mathematics (1903), which argued that the foundations of mathematics can be deduced from a few logical ideas. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He said, "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this." And, "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
Bertrand Russell: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/
-1889: Icelandic writer Gunnar Gunnarsson was born in Fljótsdalur, Iceland. He wrote novels about Iceland in the Danish language so he could reach a wider audience, and was one of the first internationally known writers of his country. From 1924 to 1928, he wrote a series of five long autobiographical novels celebrating Iceland, including Ships in the Sky and The Night and the Dream, translated into English in 1938.
Gunnar Gunnarsson: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ggunnar.htm
-1896: In Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court upheld the "separate but equal" policy.
-1921: Patrick Dennis was born Edward Everett Tanner III in Evanston, Illinois. He's best known for his novel Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade in Biography (1955), the story of a flighty, eccentric, middle-aged woman based on Dennis' actual aunt. It became a Broadway musical and a successful movie.
-1944: In a brutal mass deportation, Soviet troops expelled from Crimea more than 200,000 Crimean Tatars who were accused of Nazi collaborators.  Due to famine and disease, about 50 percent of the deportees died in Central Asia. While the decision was officially revoked in 1967, Crimean Tatars were not allowed to return until the late 1980s, and the victims or their descendants were never compensated. 
Crimean Tatars Home Page: http://www.euronet.nl/users/sota/krimtatar.html
-1952: Science fiction author Diane Elizabeth Duane was born in Manhattan. She was a psychiatrist before she published her first novel, The Door Into Fire (1979), the first of over thirty novels that include several collaborations with her husband, Peter Morwood. She said, "Those who don't know the mistakes of the past won't be able to enjoy it when they make them again in the future."
-1980: Although the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980 was far from the largest volcanic explosion ever recorded, it triggered the largest landslide in history. By the time the eruption was over, there were 230 square miles (600 square kilometers) of fresh wasteland below the volcano, including mounds of landslide debris as tall as 240 feet (73 meters). The eruption blew off the top 1,300 feet (400 m) of the mountain, and the landslide scoured a giant gash that turned the classically-shaped conical volcano into a rough, cratered mound with a large gap in one side. The entire north face of the mountain gave way, and the ensuing landslide raced as far as 15 miles downslope (24 km). Avalanche-related mudflows extended as far as the Columbia River, 48 miles away (77 km). Since the eruption, life has returned to Mount St. Helens. The landslide debris is now covered by a young, healthy ecosystem of forests and meadows. 
Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument:
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/mshnvm/
http://www.gorp.com/gorp/resource/us_nm/wa_mount.htm
See how Mount St. Helens looks right now with this live webcam:
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/mshnvm/volcanocam/
The largest known volcanic explosion on Earth:
http://features.LearningKingdom.com/fact/archive/1998/06/12.html

May 19
-1536: Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII, was beheaded in the Tower of London. She had allegedly been having an affair with multiple people, including her brother Lord Rochford. Her uncle presided over the trial and she was found guilty of treason.  
-1857: The electric fire alarm was patented.
-1895: Cuban writer and poet Jose Marti was killed by Spanish troops.
-1925: Civil rights activist Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He had a tumultuous youth. His father Earl was a Baptist minister and an outspoken supporter of the Black Rights movement. By the time Malcolm was seven years old, his family's house had been burned to the ground and his father had been kidnapped and killed. Eight years later, his mother had an emotional breakdown and was committed to a mental institution. Malcolm and his siblings were all put into foster homes and orphanages. Malcolm was very bright and excelled in school, but his teachers seriously discouraged him in his dream of becoming a lawyer. He eventually lost interest in studying. In 1946, he was convicted on burglary charges and sentenced to 7 years in prison. While incarcerated, he became interested in the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and converted to the Nation of Islam. Malcolm adopted the new surname "X", which was symbolic of his lost African name and heritage. When he was released from prison, he became one of the leading spokesmen for the Nation of Islam, and dedicated himself to the issues of black pride and unity. Malcolm's popularity as a speaker continued to grow, but he became disillusioned with the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Muhammad. He severed his ties to the Nation of Islam in 1964 and formed a new organization called the Muslim Mosque. In the same year, he also made a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It was a life-changing event. Malcolm X said, "[I met] blonde-haired, blue-eyed men I could call my brothers," and, "I've seen too much of the damage narrow-mindedness can make of things, and when I return home to America, I will devote what energies I have to repairing the damage." Malcolm relaxed his stance on black separatism when he came back to America, and on February 21, 1965, he was shot and killed at a rally at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. He was 39 years old.
Malcom X-A Research Site: http://www.brothermalcolm.net/
-1930: American playwright Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents were both civil rights activists, and moved into a white neighborhood when she was eight years old. They were met by an angry mob. A civil trial ensued, and it was this experience that formed the basis for her most successful play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), whose title comes from a Langston Hughes poem. In it, she wrote, "[W]e have decided to move into our house because my father--my father--he earned it for us brick by brick. We don't want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors. And that's all we got to say about that." Hansberry died in 1965 from cancer at the age of 34, and her friend James Baldwin wrote about the last time he saw her: "...She was seated, talking, dressed all in black, wearing a very handsome wide, black hate, thin, and radiant. I knew she had been ill, but I didn't know, then, how seriously. I said, 'Lorraine, baby, you look beautiful, how in the world do you do it?' She was leaving ... and she turned and smiled that smile and said, 'It helps to develop a serious illness, Jimmy!' and waved and disappeared."
Lorraine Hansberry: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/corhans.htm
-1935: Englishman T. E. (Thomas Edward) Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, died after a motorcycle accident in Dorset, England.  Lawrence, the object of worldwide fame for at least two generations, was a guerrilla leader in the Arab Revolt of 1916-18, which expelled the Turks from western Arabia and Syria during World War I.  Lawrence wrote "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom", which details the Arab revolt:  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385418957/thelearningkingd/104-6175147-2314838
-1941: Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron was born in New York City. She originally intended to take a different path from her parents, who were both screenwriters, and instead pursued a career in journalism. She wrote for the New York Post and Esquire, but was eventually drawn into writing scripts and screenplays. Since 1978, she has written and directed 19 films, including This is My Life (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You've Got Mail (1998). Her films Silkwood (1983) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) were both nominated for Academy Awards for Best Screenplay.
Biography of Nora Ephron: http://www.imdb.com/Bio?Ephron,%20Nora
-1971: The former Soviet Union launched Mars 2.

May 20
-325: The first Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church, called by Emperor Constantine I, was held at Nicaea in Asia Minor. More than 300 bishops from all over the Christian world were present. The council defined the date for Easter celebrations, condemned Arianism (which denied the divinity of Christ), and passed the Nicene Creed (used in liturgical worship).   Nicaea (also spelled Nicea) is now called Isnik (in Turkey).
-1588: The Spanish Armada departed from Portugal to invade England.
-1799: Author Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours, France. Despite being called the Charles Dickens of France, his early life was haunted by failure. He worked feverishly, often writing 14 hours a day, taking a short nap, and then writing the rest of the night with the help of strong Parisian coffee. By the time he was 29 years old, he had no success as a writer and was living under an enormous burden of debt, which had built up from a number of failed business ventures. Between 1830 and 1832 he published Scenes from Private Life, a series of novelettes which finally brought him literary attention. In 1833, Balzac decided to draw his old and new novels together through recurring characters and themes, to present a unified picture of French life. He called this project The Human Comedy and undertook it with great energy. At the end of his life, The Human Comedy encompassed over 90 novels and novellas and included over 2,000 named characters. They were so vivid in Balzac's imagination that his characters often entered into his daily life.
Honoré de Balzac: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/balzac.htm
-1806: Philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill was born in Pentonville, London. He had a strict and rigorous education at the hand of his father. By the time he was 8 years old, John had read Aesop's Fables in the original Greek and was beginning to study Latin. His schooling began to take its toll, however, and when he was 20, he had an emotional breakdown. When he had recovered, he realized that poetry and the arts were a necessary part of human life as well, and he began reading the work of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Goethe with zeal. He wrote On Liberty in 1859, expressing his fear that bold and freethinking people were becoming all too rare. He is also well known for his book Utilitarianism (1863), where he argued that the aim of all actions should be the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Mill idolized his wife Harriet Taylor, whom he married in 1851, and held the then radical position that women should be given the same social and political freedoms as men.
John Stuart Mill: http://www.utilitarianism.com/jsmill.htm
-1862: The Homestead Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln (1862). The Homestead Act granted 160 acres of land to anyone who was the head of a household and at least 21 years old. In return, the homesteader agreed to live on the land for 5 years. It was a milestone in the settling of the American West. Most homesteaders were seasoned farmers from the crowded East or Europe. By 1900, over 600,000 claims had been made for 80 million acres of land.
Homestead Act: http://www.nps.gov/home/homestead_act.html
-1874: Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis were granted a patent for the process of riveting pants.
-1882: Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset was born in Kallundborg, Denmark. Her first novel, Mrs. Marta Oulie, was published in 1907 while she was still working as an office secretary. The first line was, "I have been unfaithful to my husband," and the critics were scandalized. She was deeply interested in medieval life of Scandinavia and wrote historical novels set in the 13th and 14th centuries. In 1928, she became one of only nine women to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. At the onset of World War II, she joined the Norwegian resistance and was an outspoken opponent of the Nazi party. Her political views forced her to flee the country in 1940 and before she left, she donated her Nobel Prize gold medal for aid to the Finns. She lived in exile in the United States until 1945. After returning to her home in Lillehammer, she never wrote another word.
Sigrid Undset: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/undset.htm
-1910: Actor Scatman Crothers was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. Crothers gained fame as a television and movie actor after 50 years in show business.
-1916: Norman Rockwell's first cover on "The Saturday Evening Post" appeared. The illustration, a young boy having to care for his baby sibling, touched the heart of all who saw it. Rockwell drew over 300 covers for "The Saturday Evening Post." He is famous for his "The Four Freedoms," used as patriotic posters during WWII.  A biography of Norman Rockwell: http://www.illustration-house.com/bios/rockwell_bio.html
-1953: Jacqueline Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier.
-1961: A mob attacked Freedom Riders in Montgomery. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy dispatched four hundred U.S. marshals to Montgomery to keep order in Freedom Rider controversy.

May 21
-1927: Lindbergh Flight Day commemorates the landing of Charles Lindbergh in Paris concluding the first successful transatlanic flight.

May 22
-1804: Lewis and Clark began their expedition.
-1844: Mary Cassatt, American impressionist painter, was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. After getting her degree at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, she moved to Paris in 1865 and began studying the great masters in museums across Europe. Her career came into focus when she met Edgar Degas. Although he was an avowed misogynist, upon seeing Cassatt's work Degas said he would have never admitted that a woman could draw so well. He introduced her to the Impressionists, and she began showing her art in their exhibitions. Unlike the other Impressionists, Cassatt focused her painting on women and children in intimate settings instead of large social scenes. One of her favorite subjects was her sister Lydia.
WebMuseum-Casseatt, Mary: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cassatt/
-1848: The French island of Martinique in the lesser Antilles declared the abolition of slavery. Abolition created a shortage of labor in Martinique given many former slaves preferred not to work in the sugar cane plantations. To solve the problem, indentured servants were brought from China and India.  More about Martinique's abolition of slavery: http://www.washtimes.com/internatlads/martinique/6.html
-1859: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British physican and author of the Sherlock Holmes books, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1881, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in medicine. It was there that he met Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell would later serve as the model for Conan Doyle's famous detective Sherlock Holmes. Upon graduation from the university, Doyle served as ship's doctor on two vessels that sailed to Greenland and West Africa. He eventually set up his own practice in Portsmouth, England and wrote fiction in his spare time. In 1887, he wrote A Study in Scarlet, his third novel and the first that introduced Sherlock Holmes and his partner Dr. John Watson. Encouraged by his publishers, Conan Doyle wrote The Sign of Four three years later and published two-dozen short stories in The Strand magazine. The stories were immensely popular, but Doyle began to grow tired of his creation and attempted to end the series in 1894 by killing Holmes off in The Final Problem. There was a huge public outcry. One woman wrote him a letter with the opening line, "You brute!" He felt obliged to resurrect his hero, and Holmes and Watson later appeared in 34 additional short stories and 2 novels.
The Arthur Conan Doyle Society: http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/acdsocy.html
-1897: The Blackwall Tunnel under the River Thames in London was inaugurated by the Prince and Princess of Wales. At the time, Blackwall was the longest underwater tunnel in the world. The tunnel is 6,200 feet (2,066 mt) long, one-fifth of which is under the river.   The Blackwall Tunnel took six years to build: http://www.greenwich-guide.org.uk/blackwall.htm
-1927: Novelist and short story writer Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City, New York. He writes largely from his own travels to places that are isolated and where ways of life are disappearing: Peru, Nepal, and New Guinea. His first novel Race Rock (1954) established him as a writer who loved description and imagination. After visiting all of the wildlife refuges in the United States, he wrote Wildlife in America (1959), which tells the story of America's relationship with its animals over the years. Matthiessen won the National Book Award for his novel The Snow Leopard (1978), which chronicles his journey through Nepal in search of the endangered animal. Even in his fiction, he's concerned with putting the characters in the context of their environment. He said, "I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land my characters inhabit. I don't want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape."
BookPage Interview February 2000-Peter Matthiessen: http://www.bookpage.com/0002bp/peter_matthiessen.html
-1932: Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
-1933: Children's author and illustrator Arnold Lobel was born in Los Angeles, California. He was often sick as a child, and missed most of the second grade. However, he used this time to draw. When he returned, he made friends by making up stories and mixing in his own illustrations. These experiences formed the basis for his book Frog and Toad Are Friends (1971). In it, the main characters Frog and Toad have many wild adventures, but remain friends in spite of everything that happens. His book Fables (1981) won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor in children's illustration.
Arnold Lobel: http://www.carolhurst.com/authors/alobel.html
-1992: Johnny Carson hosted "The Tonight Show" for the last time.

May 23
-1701: Capt. William Kidd was hanged in London for piracy and murder. 
-1707: Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern systematic botany was born.
-1734: Austrian physician and hypnotist Franz Mesmer was born. 
-1810: Social reformer Margaret Fuller was born. 
-1824: Gen. Ambrose Burnside, who later was a U.S. senator and for whom sideburns were named, was born. 
-1883: Actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was born 
-1900: Sgt. William H. Carney became the first black to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, for his efforts during the Battle of Fort Wagner, S.C., in June 1863. 
-1910: Bandleader Artie Shaw was born. 
-1928: Singer Rosemary Clooney was born. 
-1931: Actresses Barbara Barrie was born. 
-1933: Joan Collins was born. 
-1934: Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog Synthesizer, was born. 
-1936: Actor Charles Kimbrough ("Murphy Brown") was born. 
-1939: the U.S. Navy submarine "Squalus" went down off New Hampshire in 240 feet of water. 33 of the 59 men aboard were saved in a daring rescue with a diving bell. 
-1960: Israeli agents captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and spirited him back to Israel, where he was tried, convicted and hanged. 
-1961: Comedian Drew Carey was born.
-1988: Maryland Gov. Donald Schaefer signed the nation's first law banning the manufacture and sale of cheap handguns, known as "Saturday Night Specials." 
-1991: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld federal regulations prohibiting federally funded women's clinics from discussing or advising abortion with patients. 
-1993: A jury in Baton Rouge, La., acquitted a man who said he was defending his home against what he thought was an intruder when he shot and killed 16-year-old Japanese exchange student Yoshihiro Hattori. 
-1994: Four men convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center were each sentenced to 240 years in prison. Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was laid to rest next to her first husband, President John F. Kennedy, in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. 
-1995: A man with an unloaded handgun climbed over a fence and ran toward the White House. He was tackled by one Secret Service agent and shot and wounded by a second. What was left of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, site of the previous month's bombing that killed 169 people, was razed. 
-1997: Mohammed Khatami, a "moderate" who favored improved economic ties with the West, was elected president of Iran.

May 24
-1844: Samuel F. B. Morse sent the first telegraph message from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. Morse sent the line, "What hath God wrought?", a Bible verse taken from Numbers 23:23. Morse devised a series of dots and dashes to represent the alphabet, which came to be known as "Morse code." The first transcontinental telegraph line was completed in 1861, which brought an end to the Pony Express as the fastest form of communication. It marked the beginning of the telecommunications industry.
Samuel F. B. Morse: http://www.morsehistoricsite.org/morse/morse.html
-1883: The Brooklyn Bridge was opened to the public. Taking nearly 14 years to complete, it spans the East River of New York City and links Brooklyn and Manhattan. Its 1.3 mile length made it the longest suspension bridge in the world when it first opened. On its first day of operation, more than 150,000 people crossed over. They each paid a one-cent toll.
-1940: Poet Joseph Brodsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. He dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and had a number of odd jobs, including geologic prospector and boiler-room stoker. During this time, he began writing poetry and learned English and Polish so that he could read work not yet translated into Russian. In the process, he became familiar with the works of Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner. His poetry became quite popular in underground circulation, and he was recognized as one of the leading young poets of his generation. His reputation earned the attention of the secret police, and he was tried and convicted in 1964 of "social parasitism" and sentenced to five years' hard labor in a Siberian work camp. His sentence was commuted after 18 months because of protests from around the world, but after his release he was continually harassed for being a poet and being Jewish. He left Russia in 1972 for the United States, an involuntary exile. He served as visiting poet at several universities, including Columbia and Mount Holyoke, where he taught for 15 years. During his time in the United States, Brodsky wrote poetry primarily in English and adopted the task of translating his prior work himself. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991-1992. He said, "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

Poetry of Joseph Brodsky: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/%7Esafonov/brodsky/
-1941: Singer-songwriter Robert Allen Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota. After an uneventful childhood in Hibbing, he moved to Minneapolis in 1959 to study art at the University of Minnesota. It was there that he became interested in the music of Hank Williams and Woodie Guthrie. He listened to their music voraciously, neglected classes, and began to perform in coffee shops under the name "Bob Dylan." In 1961, he dropped out of school and moved to New York, where he became a fixture in the famous folk music scene of Greenwich Village. He also made the acquaintance of his hero Woodie Guthrie, who was in the hospital with a rare disease of the nervous system. Dylan went to his bedside and performed Guthrie's own songs for him. His performances in New York earned him a recording contract, but it wasn't until his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) that he became famous, with such songs as "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and "Blowin' in the Wind." http://www.bobdylan.com/

May 25
May 25 is Africa Day. May resources can be found at: http://www.teacherplanet.com/resource/africa.php

-1803: Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied to become a Unitarian minister like his father, but left the pulpit in 1832 after the death of his wife. He had a crisis of faith and said that if his teachers had known his private thoughts, they would never have allowed him to become a minister. He went to England and met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, who all admired him. In his essay Nature (1836), Emerson claimed that each person could discover God by looking deep into themselves and the world around them.
-1908: Poet Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan. His parents were the owners of a greenhouse, which later appeared as a dominant image in Roethke's poetry symbolizing the self. Roethke struggled with bipolar disorder throughout his life and spent months in the hospital, but he used these times to explore his dark side. Roethke wrote The Lost Son and Other Poems (1949), Praise to the End! (1951), and I Am! Said the Lamb (1961), a collection of children's poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for his poetry collection The Waking.
Theodore Roethke-The Academy of America Poets: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=13
-1938: Raymond Carver was born in the town of Clatskanie, Oregon, and who was, in his own words, a "poet, short story writer, and occasional essayist-in that order." He got married just out of high school and had two children by the age of 21. To support his family, Carver worked as a gas station attendant, deliveryman, and janitor while his wife worked for the phone company. Carver wrote about the lives and problems of ordinary working people. He wrote about alcoholism, domestic abuse, and isolation, and characters who are more resilient than they think they are. His first collection of stories Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was published in 1976 and established him as a writer. He also wrote Furious Seasons and Other Stories (1977), Cathedral (1983), and Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985). Carver struggled with acute alcoholism for most of his life. He often said that he lived two lives, one that ended the day he quit drinking and another that began the same day. He died of lung cancer in 1988 at the age of fifty. He had been sober for eleven years.
Raymond Carver: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rcarver.htm

May 26
Australia National Sorry Day: http://www.alphalink.com.au/~rez/Journey/
-1521: The German priest and theologian Martin Luther was declared an outlaw and his writings were banned by the Edict of Worms. He had entered the religious life because one night, as a young man, he'd been caught in a terrible thunderstorm, and swore to God that if he survived he would become a monk. He was ordained, studied theology, and eventually got a job as a professor. He often confessed to his students that he didn't understand parts of the Bible, and he asked for their help to figure it out. As his career progressed, he began to make more and more controversial lectures. In Luther's time, a common practice of the church was the sale of indulgences, which decreased the time a person had to spend in Purgatory. In 1517, the church was trying to raise money to build the Sistine Chapel, and its agents began to pitch the sale of indulgences much more aggressively. Luther was disgusted, and on the eve of All Saints Day in 1517, he posted 95 theses attacking indulgences on the door of his church. He wrote, "All those who consider themselves secure in their salvation through letters of indulgence will be eternally damned, and so will their teachers." Luther was summoned to Rome, got into an argument with a cardinal there, heard a rumor that he would be imprisoned, and fled the city with help from friends. In 1520, Luther published even more controversial writings, attacking papal authority and the whole structure of the church. That December there was a bonfire at his university, where he burned a copy of canon law and a copy of the Pope's indictment of him. In April 1521, he was called before the Diet of Worms, a legal assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, and the officials asked him to reject his writings. He said that he couldn't do so unless convinced by Scripture or reason. Two months later, on May 26, the Diet declared him an outlaw and his writings banned. His writings inspired the Protestant Reformation.
A MIGHTY FORTRESS IS OUR GOD-Martin Luther: http://www.luther.de/en/
-1886: Singer Al Jolson was born.
-1907: Actor John Wayne (Marion Morrison) was born.
-1908: Actor Robert Morley (Adolph Wilton) was born.
-1913: Actor Peter Cushing was born.
-1948: Singer Stevie (Stephanie) Nicks was born.
-1949: Singer Hank Williams was born.
-1981: The first software patent was granted after seven years of battle in the courts. Computer programmer and patent attorney S. Pal Asija was granted a patent for his software program "SwiftAnswer". Prior to this case, software programs were considered copyrightable writings, as opposed to patentable inventions. This case set the legal precendent for future software patents.

May 27
-1794: Capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt was born.
-1837: US Marshall and Forntiersman Wild Bill (James) Hickok was born.
-1894: Detective novelist Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary's County, Maryland. His style of writing was called "hard-boiled" and it contained almost no extraneous detail. In one story, he described a woman by writing, "Her eyes were blue, her mouth red, her teeth white, and she had a nose. Without getting steamed up over the details, she was nice." Critics consider The Maltese Falcon (1930) to be his masterpiece. The novel introduced the character Sam Spade, one of the most famous fictional detectives of all time.
Dashiell Hammett: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dhammett.htm
-1907: Silent Spring author Rachel Carson was born.
-1911: Actor Vincent Price was born.
-1912: Novelist and short story writer John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. As a child, his grade school teacher let him tell stories to the class if the children had been good. In the spring of his junior year, Cheever was expelled from prep school for poor grades. He wrote a story about it called "Expelled" (1930), and it was published in The New Republic magazine. He moved to New York and visited Malcolm Cowley, the editor who had accepted the story. Cowley invited him to a party, where Cheever, trying to look sophisticated, drank too many cocktails. He thanked the hostess, rushed out into the apartment hallway, and threw up on the wallpaper. Cowley didn't mind, and introduced him to the literary society of New York. Cheever struggled to write his first novel, which he hoped would get him out of debt. When he finally finished it, he said to the editor, "You may think there are too many smells in the book, and I just want you to know I'm not going to take any of them out. I am a very olfactory fellow." The novel, called The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), won the National Book Award and became a Book-of-the-Month selection. He went on to write many other novels and collections of short stories, and won the Pulitzer Prize for The Stories of John Cheever (1978). Cheever kept journals for his entire life, and he arranged with his son to have the journals published after his death. The Journals of John Cheever came out in 1991. In the book, Cheever wrote about his struggles with alcoholism, adultery and depression, but he always comes back to nature and the weather, which comforted him.

John Cheever: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cheever.htm
-1922: Actor Christopher Lee was born.
-1923: Henry Kissinger was born.
-1930: Novelist John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland. He's the author of novels such as The Floating Opera (1956) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991).
-1936: Actor Lou Gossett was born.
-1937: Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrians , having taken five years to build. The 4,200 foot wide Golden Gate Bridge spans the Golden Gate Strait in the entrance to San Francisco Harbor. Two days later, the bridge was opened to vehicular traffic.
- 1943: Singer Cilla Black (Priscilla Maria Veronica White) was born.

May 28
-1779: Romantic poet Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, Ireland. His greatest work was a ten-volume collection called Irish Melodies, and the first edition was published in 1808. Many of the poems were set to music, and they are still sung by the Irish today.
Thomas Moore: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tmoore.htm
-1908: Novelist Ian (Lancaster) Fleming was born in London, England. As a young man, he worked for the Reuters news agency as a Moscow correspondent. During World War II, he served in the British Naval Intelligence. During his service, he once spotted a group of German agents at a casino, and devised a plan to take all their money in a game of baccarat. He lost, but later wrote a fictionalized version of the story in his first James Bond novel Casino Royale (1954). He start