1551 – The oldest university in the Americas, National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, was founded.
1820 - Florence Nightingale, English nurse born. (d. 1910) (Nightingale who came to be known as "The Lady with the Lamp", was a pioneer of modern nursing, a writer and a noted statistician.)
Florence Nightingale
1842 - Jules Massenet, French composer born. (d. 1912) (Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, his style fell out of favor not long after his death; and, except Manon, his works were rarely performed.)
“Meditation” from Thais
1845 - Gabriel Fauré, French composer born. (d. 1924) (Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist, and teacher. He was the foremost French composer of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th century composers. His harmonic and melodic language affected how harmony was later taught.)
Pavane in F-sharp minor, Op. 50, paintings by Claude Monet
1884 - Bedřich Smetana, Czech composer died. (b. 1824) (Smetana was a Czech composer. He is best known for his symphonic poem Vltava (better known as The Moldau from the German), the second in a cycle of six which he entitled Má vlast ("My Country"), and for his opera The Bartered Bride.)
Ma Vlast (The Moldau) Vltava, Rafael Kubelik - Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (Partial)
1885 – North-West Rebellion: Louis Riel and the Métis rebels were decisively defeated by Canadian forces under Major-General Frederick Middleton in Batoche, Saskatchewan.
1926 – A general strike by British trade unions "in defence of [coal] miners' wages and hours" ended after nine days.
1932 - Ten weeks after his abduction, the infant son of Charles Lindbergh is found dead in Hopewell, New Jersey just a few miles from the Lindberghs' home.
1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computer, in Berlin. Konrad Zuse's Z3 was the first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine; whose attributes, with the addition of conditional branching, have often been the ones used as criteria in defining a computer. The Z3 was built with 2,000 relays, had a clock frequency of ~5–10 Hz, and a word length of 22 bits.[1] Calculations on the computer were performed in full binary floating point arithmetic.
1958 – Canada and the United States signed a formal agreement establishing the North American Air Defense Command to provide aerospace warning and defense for North America.
Picture of the Day
Steam locomotives of the Chicago and North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards, December 1942. Roundhouses are large, circular or semicircular buildings used for servicing locomotives. Due to the advent of newer railway practices, modern roundhouses are frequently not round and are simply service facilities, although they have retained the traditional name.
On This Day (May 11)
1745 – War of the Austrian Succession: French forces defeated the Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian "Pragmatic Army" at the Battle of Fontenoy in the Austrian Netherlands in present day Belgium.
1792 – Merchant sea-captain Robert Gray first entered the Columbia River, the largest river flowing into the Pacific Ocean from North America.
1812 – British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated by John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons.
1820 - Launch of HMS Beagle the ship that took young Charles Darwin on his scientific voyage.
1904 - Salvador Dalí, Spanish painter born. (d. 1989) (Dali was a Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work.)
The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954)
1918 - Richard Feynman, American physicist, Nobel laureate born. (d. 1988) (Feynman was an American physicist known for expanding the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and particle theory.)
1918 – The Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus was established, with Tapa Tchermoeff as the first prime minister.
1946 - Robert Jarvik, American physician and inventor born. (Jarvik is an American scientist, researcher and entrepreneur known for his role in developing the Jarvik-7 artificial heart.)
1949 – Siam was officially renamed Thailand.
1960 – Mossad agents captured Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi leader and fugitive war criminal hiding in Argentina.
1997 - IBM Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, becoming the first computer to beat a world-champion chess player.
Picture of the Day
The head and mandibles of an Australian bull ant. Insect mandibles grasp, crush, or cut the insect’s food, or defend against predators or rivals. These mandibles move in the horizontal plane unlike those of the vertebrates.
On This Day (May 10)
1503 – Christopher Columbus and his crew became the first Europeans to visit the Cayman Islands, naming them Las Tortugas after the numerous sea turtles there.
1775 - American Revolutionary War: Representatives from the 13 colonies of the United States meet in Philadelphia and raise the Continental Army to defend the new republic. They place it under command of George Washington of Virginia.
1850 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, French chemist and physicist died. (b. 1778) (Gay-Lussac was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for two laws related to gases, and for his work on alcohol-water mixtures, which led to the degrees Gay-Lussac used to measure alcoholic beverages in many countries.)
1857 – The Sepoy Rebellion broke out in colonial India, threatening the rule of the British East India Company.
1869 – The First Transcontinental Railroad of North America was completed with the golden spike ceremony in Promontory Summit, Utah.
1902 - David O. Selznick, American film producer born. (d. 1965) (Gone With the Wind)
1924 – J. Edgar Hoover became the first director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
1940 – British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned and formally recommended Winston Churchill as his successor.
1954 - Bill Haley & His Comets release "Rock Around the Clock", the first rock and roll record to reach number one on the charts.
05-11-2008, 09:12 PM
On This Day (May 12) 
