A very busy day in history....

On April 30, 1803, the U.S. and France conclude negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the young American nation. On April 30, 1812, exactly nine years after the Louisiana Purchase agreement was made, the first of 13 states to be carved from the territory–Louisiana–is admitted into the Union as the 18th U.S. state.

On April 30, 1945, with Berlin surrounded and all hope of victory lost, Adolph Hitler commits suicide in a bunker under his headquarters in Berlin. Hitler and his long-time mistress and bride of one day, Eva Braun, each swallow a cyanide capsule. Hitler makes sure of his own death by then shooting himself in the head. Their bodies are hastily cremated in the chancellery garden before they can be taken by the Soviets.

On April 30, 2004, the CBS program 60 Minutes releases photos of Iraqi prisoners being abused by their American captors in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

On April 30, 1993, four years after publishing a proposal for “an idea of linked information systems,” computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee releases the source code for the world’s first web browser and editor. Originally called Mesh, the browser that he dubs WorldWideWeb is the first royalty-free, easy-to-use means of browsing the emerging information network that will develop into the internet as we know it today.

On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese stronghold of Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City) falls to the People's Army of Vietnam as the U.S. Congress refuses President Gerald Ford's plea to offer further military aid. The Viet Cong colonel who accepts the South Vietnamese surrender tells the surrendering general that the war is over, but there are no victors or vanquished among Vietnamese Patriots. Only the Americans have been defeated.

On April 30, 1993, Monica Seles, the world's top ranked woman tennis player, is stabbed by a deranged German man during a break in a match in Hamburg. The assailant, a fan of German tennis star Steffi Graf, apparently hoped that by injuring Seles his idol Graf would be able to regain her No. 1 ranking. Seles would be out of tennis for more than 2 years, and after coming back would win her fourth Grand Slam title, the 1996 Australian Open, before retiring in 2008.

On April 30, 1997, in a widely publicized episode of the ABC sitcom Ellen, TV character Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) announces that she is gay. The episode - which gives American television its first openly homosexual lead character - airs just a week after DeGeneres "comes out" in real life in a TIME magazine interview.

On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers staged a nationwide work stoppage to demand the adoption of a standard eight-hour workday. The May Day Strike becomes an annual event, as the government is slow to relax private business' general policy of the 10 hours-a-day, 6 day work week. The implementation of today's 40-hour work week won't come along until the early 20th century; Ford Motor Company is one of the first major employers to implement it, on May 1, 1926.

On May 1, 1960, An American U-2 spy plane is shot down while conducting espionage over the Soviet Union. Assured by the CIA that the plane was equipped with self-destruct mechanisms and that the pilot had instructions to kill himself, President Eisenhower at first denied the incident, until the Soviets produced the nearly-intact wreckage and pilot Francis Gary Powers, very much alive. The incident derailed a major peace summit scheduled 2 weeks later. The Soviets held Powers until 1962, when he was exchanged for a captured spy.


On May 1, 1863, the Battle of Chancellorsville begins in Virginia. Southern General Robert E. Lee's outnumbered force wins a decisive victory, but at tremendous cost. General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, one of Lee's corps commanders and one of the best tactical commanders in American history, is hit by friendly fire near the close of battle and dies on May 10.

On May 1, 1931, the Empire State Building in New York City officially opens. The brainchild of General Motors president John J. Raskob, who wanted to outdo the recently opened Chrysler Building a few blocks away, the Empire building is constructed in less than a year, under budget, and at 1,250 feet (1,454 including the lightning rod), will be the world's tallest building until surpassed by the World Trade Center further down Manhattan in 1972. (undated photo; the Chrysler Building is the tallest structure to the right)

On May 2, 1945, approximately 1 million German soldiers lay down their arms as the terms of the German unconditional surrender, signed at Caserta on April 29, come into effect. Early this same day, Russian Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov accepts the surrender of the German capital. The Red Army takes 134,000 German soldiers prisoner.

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, is killed by U.S. forces during a raid on his compound hideout in Pakistan. The notorious, 54-year-old leader of Al Qaeda, the terrorist network of Islamic extremists, had been the target of a nearly decade-long international manhunt.


On May 2, 1939, New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig benches himself, bringing his streak of consecutive games to an end at 2,130. In a little over a month, he will be diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of muscular dystrophy. Gehrig maintained his streak through "multiple" incidents of undiagnosed broken bones (revealed by x-rays after his retirement), multiple bouts with the flu and at least 2 incidents where he was knocked unconscious by bean balls. The streak will be unmatched until broken by Cal Ripken, Jr. in 1995.

On May 2, 1933, the Inverness Courier (Scotland) relates an account of a local couple who claim to have seen “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface” of Loch Ness, a deep freshwater loch (lake) southwest of Inverness. Its not the first account of the "Loch Ness Monster"; reported sightings go back as far as 1870. But this is the story that generates the first real interest in documenting if some sort of large creature lives in the loch. The story of the “monster” (a moniker chosen by the Courier editor) becomes a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound sterling reward for capture of the beast. Several credible sonar sweeps of the loch in the 1960's identify some type of large, moving underwater object, and a 1975 expedition brings back a photo of what vaguely resembles a giant flipper on an aquatic animal. The most famous bit of "proof", a 1934 photo taken by London doctor Robert Wilson and published in the London Daily Mail (below) was proven to be a hoax in 1994. That hasn't dampened the enthusiasm as tourists and investigators still flock to Loch Ness hoping for a glimpse of one of the world's most famous unproven oddities.

On May 3, 1942. an American Navy task force, built around the carriers Lexington and Yorktown, intercepts a Japanese invasion force moving on Port Moresby, New Guinea. Over the next four days, what is considered the first modern naval engagement in history, the Battle of the Coral Sea, takes place. It is the first naval battle in history in which opposing ships do not fire a shot at each other; all fighting takes place between aircraft, or aircraft and ships. The defense of Moresby would cost the Americans the Lexington, with the Yorktown suffering severe damage. In exchange, they damaged two Japanese fleet carriers and sank one medium-sized carrier. More importantly, they caused the enemy to withdraw its invasion force, giving the Americans their first strategic victory in the Pacific Theatre.

On May 3, 1965, the lead element of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, stationed in Okinawa, departs for South Vietnam. It will be the first U.S. Army ground combat unit committed to the war.

On May 3, 1980, 13-year-old Cari Lightner of Fair Oaks, California, is walking along a quiet road on her way to a church carnival when a car swerves out of control, striking and killing her. When police arrested Clarence Busch, the driver who hit Cari, they found that he had a record of arrests for intoxication, and had in fact been arrested on another hit-and-run drunk-driving charge less than a week earlier. Cari's mother Candy would be told by a policeman that drunk driving was rarely prosecuted harshly, and that Busch was unlikely to spend significant time behind bars (he would eventually be charged with vehicular homicide and spend 21 months in jail). Furious, Lightner decided to take action against what she later called “the only socially accepted form of homicide.” The result is the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), which would grow into one of the country’s most influential non-profit organizations.