On May 14:

• 1483 – Charles VIII of France (Charles l’Affable) has his coronation
• 1643 – Upon the death of Louis XIII, his son, four year old Louis XIV, becomes King of France
• 1804 – The Lewis and Clark Expedition departs from Camp Dubois
• 1863– Battle of Jackson takes place (Civil War)
• 1925 – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is published
• 1948 – Israel is attacked by its neighboring Arab states (starting the 1948 Arab-Israeli war) after it gains its independence
• 1984 – Mark Zuckerberg, co-creator of Facebook, is born in White Plains, NY.
• 2012 – Iran resumed talks with the United Nations’ nuclear agency in Vienna

On May 11:

• 912 – Alexander becomes the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire
• 1812 – John Bellingham assassinates the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, in the House of Commons, London
• 1908 – America celebrates its first Mother’s Day in Grafton, West Virginia
• 1867 – Luxembourg gains its independence
• 1904 – Salvador Dali is born in Figueres, Spain
• 1927 – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is founded
• 1949 – Israel joins the United Nations
• 1987 – The first heart-lung transplant is completed by Dr. Bruce Reitz in Baltimore, Maryland
• 2012 – Rebekah Brooks (former newspaper editor and News Corp. exec) testifies at a press ethics inquiry in London

On May 10, 2012:

• 1503 – The Cayman Islands are visited by Christopher Columbus and named Las Tortugas thanks to their numerous turtles
• 1774 – Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette become king and queen of France
• 1908 – America celebrates its firth Mother’s Day in Grafton, West Virginia
• 1940 – Winston Churchill becomes the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• 1960 – The first underwater circumnavigation of the earth is completed by the nuclear submarine USS Triton
• 1994 – Nelson Mandela is sworn in as South Africa’s first black president
• 2002 – Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent, is sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for selling US secrets to Moscow for payment of $1.4 million in cash and diamonds
• 2012 – Putin cancels US Summit visit and meeting with Obama

On May 9th, 2012:

• 1502 – Christopher Columbus left Cadiz, Spain, on his fourth and final trip to the Western Hemisphere
• 1688 – Transylvania became part of the kingdom of Hungary
• 1914 – Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation that officially established the first national Mother’s Day holiday to celebrate America’s mothers
• 1974 – The House Judiciary Committee opened hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon
• 1994 – South Africa’s newly-elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first black president
• 2004 – Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov and 23 other people were killed in a bombing in the capital Grozny
• 2012 – North Carolina OKs constitutional gay marriage ban

Mark Twain, photographed by A.F. Bradley, NY

• 1782 – The United States and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, ending the Revolutionary War
• 1835 – Author Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, MO
• 1939 – USSR attacked Finland
• 1966 – The former British colony of Barbados became independent
• 1979 – The album “The Wall” by Pink Floyd was released
• 1995 – President Bill Clinton became the first U.S. chief executive to visit Northern Ireland
• 1999 – The opening of a 135-nation trade gathering in Seattle was disrupted by at least 40,000 demonstrators, some of whom clashed with police
• 2010 – Pentagon leaders called for scrapping the 17-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban after releasing a survey about the prospect of openly gay troops
• 2011 – Mass strikes began across the UK, with up to 2 million workers from schools, hospitals and police stations walking off in protest to proposed pension reforms

Statue of C.S. Lewis looking into a wardrobe. Entitled "The Searcher" by Ross Wilson.

• 1832 – American writer Louisa May Alcott was born
• 1898 – C. S. Lewis, English writer, was born
• 1924 – Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels
• 1947 – U.N. voted for partition of Palestine
• 1963 – U.S. President LBJ formed a commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination
• 2009 – Iran approved plans to build 10 industrial scale uranium enrichment facilities in defiance of U.N. demands it halt enrichment
• 2011 – Anders Behring Breivik, responsible for murdering 77 people in Norway in July, was declared a paranoid schizophrenic by psychiatrists

William Blake in an 1807, portrait by Thomas Phillips

• 1520 – Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan entered the Pacific Ocean with three ships, becoming the first European explorer to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic
• 1582 – William Shakespeare, 18, married and Anne Hathaway, 26
• 1757 – William Blake, English poet and painter was born
• 1943 – President Roosevelt, British PM Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin met in Tehran during WWII
• 1954 – Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, the first man to create and control a nuclear chain reaction, and one of the Manhattan Project scientists, died in Chicago at the age of 53
• 1964 – President Lyndon Johnson’s top advisers and other members of the National Security Council recommended that the president adopt a plan for a two-stage escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam
• 2011 – Egyptians streamed into polling places to vote in the first election since a revolt that toppled one of the world’s longest-serving rulers, Hosni Mubarak

The Fobos-Grunt spacecraft sitting on top of its main propulsion unit (MDU) during pre-launch processing in Baikonur Cosmodrome

• 1887 – ‘Bloody Sunday’ in England
• 1889 – The jukebox made its debut, at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco
• 1936 – First issue of “Life” magazine was published
• 1940 – Romania became an Axis “power”
• 1971 – The People’s Republic of China was seated in the U.N. Security Council
• 1981 – U.S. President Reagan gave authority to the CIA to establish the Contras
• 2003 – Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as president of Georgia in the face of protests
• 2010 – North and South Korean forces traded fire on Tuesday, leaving two South Korean marines dead
• 2011 – Contact was finally made with Russia’s stranded Phobos-Grunt probe that was launched for a Mars mission by the Russians and stranded in Earth’s orbit since its launch on Nov. 9

Blackbeard the Pirate: this was published in Defoe, Daniel; Johnson, Charles (1736) "Capt. Teach alias Black-Beard"

• 1718 – English pirate Edward Teach – better known as “Blackbeard” – was killed during a battle off the Virginia coast
• 1906 – The SOS distress signal was adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin
• 1967 – The UN Security Council approved Resolution 242, which called for Israel to withdraw from territories it captured in 1967, and implicitly called on adversaries to recognize Israel’s right to exist
• 1968 – The Beatles’ “White Album” was released
• 1975 – Juan Carlos was proclaimed king of Spain
• 1998 – “60 Minutes” aired video of Dr. Jack Kevorkian administering lethal drugs to a terminally ill patient
• 2004 – Tens of thousands of demonstrators jammed downtown Kiev, denouncing Ukraine’s presidential runoff election as fraudulent and chanting the name of reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko
• 2011 – A day after the United States, Britain and Canada announced tougher sanctions against Iran as a response to the country’s suspected nuclear weapons program, the Russian Foreign Ministry called the measures “unacceptable and against international law”

Mariano Rajoy in Bilbao

• 1973 – President Richard Nixon’s attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate
• 1989 – The proceedings of Britain’s House of Commons were televised live for the first time
• 2000 – The Florida Supreme Court granted Democrat Al Gore’s request to keep the presidential election recount going
• 2002 – NATO invited seven former communist countries to join the alliance: Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria
• 2005 – Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon broke away from the hardline Likud with the intention of forming a new party
• 2007 – Officials announced the recall of more than a half-million pieces of Chinese-made children’s jewelry contaminated with lead.
• 2010 – Debt-struck Ireland formally applied for a massive EU-IMF loan to stem the flight of capital from its banks
• 2011 – Spain’s Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy, who led his party to victory in the general election on Saturday, promised “no miracles” and a search for solutions for the country’s debt crisis