These historical events took place on May 5th:
1778: George Washington appoints Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben Inspector General of the Continental Army.
1840: Thomas Carlyle begins his famous lecture series “The Hero as Divinity”, later collected in his book “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History.”
1877: Sitting Bull leads his band of Lakota into Canada to avoid harassment by the United States Army under Colonel Nelson Miles known as the Indian Wars.
1893: The panic of 1893 causes a large crash on the New York Stock Exchange.
1917: Eugene Bullard gains his pilot’s license from Aéro-Club de France and becomes the first African-American military pilot working for the French Air Service.
1920: United States President Woodrow Wilson makes Communist Labor Party illegal.
1947: Mississippi Valley flooding kills 16 & causes $850M in damage.
1952: “Lucy Does a TV Commercial,” also known as “Vitameatavegamin,” episode of “I Love Lucy” premieres, garnering 68% of United States television viewers.
1958: The United States performs an atmospheric nuclear test at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
1962: The “West Side Story” soundtrack album goes #1 & stays #1 for 54 weeks which is more than 20 weeks longer than any other album.
2008: American/Columbia Records releases “Home Before Dark”, the twenty-seventh studio album by Neil Diamond; tops charts in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
2017: Anna Wintour, the editor of US Vogue, is made a dame by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace.