Once Upon A Time – May 16 – 1929 – First Academy Awards Ceremony Took Place Before Just 250 Guests

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