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On May 31, 1921, a race riot erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when white mobs looted and destroyed the affluent Black district of Greenwood in response to reports that a Black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator; hundreds are believed to have died.
Workers digging in a vineyard along the Via Salaria discovered the Christian catacombs of ancient Rome by accident in 1578.
The first copyright act was signed into law by President George Washington in 1790.
The Big Ben clock tower in London first chimed in 1859.
In 1889, the South Fork Dam collapsed, killing 2,200 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and flooding the town with 20 million tonnes of water.
The Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures merged in 1935 to form 20th Century Fox, a film studio.
Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi official, was hanged in Israel for his role in the Holocaust a few minutes before midnight in 1962.
A magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck Peru in 1970, killing roughly 67,000 people.
The Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed in 1977, three years after it was first proposed, despite opposition from environmentalists and Alaska Natives. (After 20 days, the pipeline began to flow with oil.)
House Speaker Jim Wright announced his resignation in 1989 after being dogged by questions about his ethics. (He was succeeded by Tom Foley later.)
Dr. George Tiller, a rare late-term abortion provider, was fatally shot in a Wichita, Kansas, church in 2009. (Gunman Scott Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for the next 50 years.) At the age of 97, Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the RMS Titanic’s sinking in 1912, died in Southampton, England.
In 2014, the Taliban released Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier held captive in Afghanistan, in exchange for five Afghan detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Bergdahl later pleaded guilty to endangering his comrades by walking away from his post in Afghanistan; his sentence included a dishonourable discharge, a reduction in rank, and a fine, but no prison time.)
In 2019, a long-time city employee opened fire in a Virginia Beach municipal building, killing 12 people on three floors before being shot and killed by police; officials said DeWayne Craddock had resigned by email hours before the shooting.
Ten years ago, Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared that NATO airstrikes on civilian targets would no longer be allowed. Ratko Mladic, a former Bosnian Serb military commander, has been detained by the United Nations in the Netherlands, where he will face charges of genocide.
Five years ago, a jury found Drew Peterson, a former suburban Chicago police officer, guilty of attempting to hire someone to assassinate the prosecutor who assisted him in the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio.
This time last year: Thousands of protesters took to the streets across the United States, with peaceful protests against police killings being overshadowed by unrest; officials deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers and imposed strict curfews in major cities. Protesters lit fires near the White House in Washington, D.C., amid rising tensions with police who used tear gas and stun grenades. President Donald Trump blamed anarchists and the media for the escalation of violence in a series of tweets. The White House announced that it had sent more than 2 million doses of a malaria drug to Brazil, which Trump claimed could protect against the coronavirus despite the lack of scientific evidence to support those claims. Two NASA astronauts were flown to the International Space Station by SpaceX, a privately-owned spacecraft. Christo died in New York at the age of 84. He was known for large-scale public art projects that often involved wrapping large structures in fabric.
