List of May 16 Historical Events and Facts

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This Day In History: List of May 16 Historical Events and Facts

• 218: Julia Maesa, aunt of the assassinated Caracalla, is banished to her home in Syria by the self-proclaimed emperor Macrinus and declares her 14-year old grandson Elagabalus, emperor of Rome.
• 1204: Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders is crowned as the first Emperor of the Latin Empire.
• 1527: The Florentines drive out the Medici for a second time and Florence re-establishes itself as a republic.
• 1532: Sir Thomas More resigns as Lord Chancellor of England.
• 1568: Mary, Queen of Scots, flees to England.
• 1770: 14-year old Marie Antoinette marries 15-year-old Louis-Auguste who later becomes king of France.
• 1771: The Battle of Alamance, a pre-American Revolutionary War battle between local militia and a group of rebels called “The Regulators”, occurs in present-day Alamance County, North Carolina.
• 1777: Lachlan McIntosh and Button Gwinnett shoot each other during a duel near Savannah, Georgia.

Gwinnett, a signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence, dies three days later.

• 1811: Peninsular War: The allies Spain, Portugal and Britain, defeat the French at the Battle of Albuera.
• 1815: The Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, officially names the town of Blackheath in the upper Blue Mountains.
• 1822: Greek War of Independence: The Turks capture the Greek town of Souli.
• 1836: Edgar Allan Poe marries his 13-year-old cousin Virginia.
• 1843: The first major wagon train heading for the Pacific Northwest sets out on the Oregon Trail with one thousand pioneers from Elm Grove, Missouri.
• 1866: The U.S. Congress eliminates the half dime coin and replaces it with the five cent piece, or nickel.
• 1866: Charles Elmer Hires invents root beer.
• 1868: President Andrew Johnson is acquitted in his impeachment trial by one vote in the United States Senate.
• 1874: A flood on the Mill River in Massachusetts destroys much of four villages and kills 139 people.
• 1877: May 16, 1877 political crisis in France.
• 1910: The United States Congress authorizes the creation of the United States Bureau of Mines.
• 1914: The first ever Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup final is played.

Brooklyn Field Club defeats Brooklyn Celtic 2-1.

• 1918: The Sedition Act of 1918 is passed by the U.S. Congress, making criticism of the government an imprisonable offense.
• 1919: A naval Curtiss aircraft NC-4 commanded by Albert Cushing Read leaves Trepassey, Newfoundland, for Lisbon via the Azores on the first transatlantic flight.
• 1920: In Rome, Pope Benedict XV canonizes Joan of Arc as a saint.
• 1929: In Hollywood, California, the first Academy Awards are handed out.
• 1943: Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ends.
• 1948: Chaim Weizmann is elected the first President of Israel.
• 1951: The first regularly scheduled transatlantic flights begin between Idlewild Airport in New York City and Heathrow Airport in London, operated by El Al Israel Airlines.
• 1960: Nikita Khrushchev demands an apology from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower for U-2 spy plane flights over the Soviet Union thus ending a Big Four summit in Paris.
• 1960: Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
• 1965: The Campbell Soup Company introduces SpaghettiOs under its Franco-American brand.
• 1966: The Communist Party of China issues the ‘May 16 Notice’, marking the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
• 1969: Venera program: Venera 5, a Soviet spaceprobe, lands on Venus.
• 1974: Josip Broz Tito is re-elected president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

This time he is elected for life.

• 1975: India annexes Sikkim after the mountain state holds a referendum in which the popular vote is in favour of merging with India.
• 1975: Junko Tabei becomes the first woman to reach the summit of Mount EvereSt.
• 1983: Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement rebels against the Sudanese government.
• 1986: The Seville Statement on Violence is adopted by an international meeting of scientists, convened by the Spanish National Commission for UNESCO, in Seville, Spain.
• 1988: A report by United States’ Surgeon General C.

Everett Koop states that the addictive properties of nicotine are similar to those of heroin and cocaine.

• 1991: Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland addressed a joint session of the United States Congress.

She is the first British monarch to address the U.S. Congress.

• 1992: STS-49: Space Shuttle Endeavour lands safely after a successful maiden voyage.
• 2003: In Casablanca, Morocco, 33 civilians are killed and more than 100 people are injured in the Casablanca terrorist attacks.
• 2004: The Day of Mourning at Bykivnia forest, just outside of Kiev, Ukraine.

Here during 1930s and early 1940s communist bolsheviks executed over 100,000 Ukrainian civilians.

• 2005: Kuwait permits women’s suffrage in a 35-23 National Assembly vote.