President Kennedy orders more troops to South Vietnam

In London, Spencer Perceval, prime minister of Britain since 1809, is shot to death by deranged businessman John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons. Bellingham, who was inflamed by his failure to obtain government compensation for war debts incurred in Russia, gave himself up immediately. Spencer Perceval had a profitable law practice […]

A dismounted Union trooper fatally wounds J.E.B. Stuart, one of the most well-known generals of the South, at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, just six miles north of Richmond, Virginia. The 31-year-old Stuart died the next day. During the 1864 spring campaign in Virginia, Union General Ulysses S. Grant applied constant pressure on Robert E. […]

On May 11, 1947, the B.F. Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio, announces it has developed a tubeless tire, a technological innovation that would make automobiles safer and more efficient. The culmination of more than three years of engineering, Goodrich’s tubeless tire effectively eliminated the inner tube, trapping the pressurized air within the tire walls themselves. […]

On May 11, 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who organized Adolf Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question,” is captured in Argentina. On May 23, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announces to the world that he will stand trial in Israel. Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1906. In November 1932, he […]

On May 11, 1972, Mexican American labor organizer and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez begins a hunger strike. The strike, which he undertook in opposition to an Arizona law severely restricting farm workers’ ability to organize, lasted 24 days and drew national attention to the suffering of itinerant farm workers in the Southwest. A fervent […]

Fifty-six people die in a fire in the grandstand at a soccer stadium in Bradford, England, on May 11, 1985. The wooden roof that burned was scheduled to be replaced by a steel roof later that same week. Bradford was playing Lincoln City on the afternoon of May 11. Many fans were there to celebrate […]

On May 11, 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov resigns after 19 moves in a game against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by scientists at IBM. This was the sixth and final game of their match, which Kasparov lost two games to one, with three draws. Kasparov, a chess prodigy from Azerbaijan, was a skillful […]