1868 US Senate fails to impeach President Andrew Johnson by one vote
Interior of a packed St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as Joan of Arc is canonized by the PopeCanonization of Joan of Arc
1920 French heroine Joan of Arc is canonized as a saint by Pope Benedict XV
1943 Operation Chastise: No. 617 Squadron RAF begins the famous Dambusters Raid, bombing the Möhne and Eder dams in the Ruhr valley with bouncing bombs
1944 1st of 180,000+ Hungarian Jews reach Auschwitz
1989 Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping meet in Beijing and formally end a 30-year rift
2013 Human stem cells are successfully cloned
Historical Events Today Events in 2023
Today in Film & TV
Janet Gaynor, the only woman to win Best Actress for multiple roles, receives her award from Douglas Fairbanks
1929 1st Academy Awards: “Wings”, Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor win
1946 Irving Berlin, Dorothy and Herbert Fields’ musical “Annie Get Your Gun” starring Ethel Merman and featuring “There’s No Business Like Show Business” opens at Imperial Theater, NYC
1986 “Top Gun”, directed by Tony Scott and starring Tom Cruise premieres
Today in Sport
1948 First chess world championship since WWII; Russian player Mikhail Botvinnik wins a 5-player tournament to begin 20-year Russian domination
1985 Michael Jordan named NBA Rookie of Year
1960 Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California
1990 Eugene Stoner and Mikhail Kalashnikov, the creators of the M16 rifle and the AK-47 rifle respectively, meet in Washington, D.C.
Famous Weddings
1770 Marie Antoinette (14) marries future King Louis XVI (15) of France
1836 American writer Edgar Allan Poe (26) marries his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm
1981 Pretenders’ Martin Chambers weds Tracy Atkinson
The first Academy Awards ceremony took place on this day before just 250 guests. All the movies nominated for what would become known as an Oscar were silent – May 16, 1929
