May 13: What Happened on This Day in History (High_school Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1787 - Captain Arthur Phillip leaves Portsmouth, England, with eleven ships full of convicts (the "First Fleet") to establish a penal colony in Australia.
2. 1861 - American Civil War: Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom issues a "proclamation of neutrality" which recognizes the breakaway states as having belligerent rights.
3. 1861 - The Great Comet of 1861 is discovered by John Tebbutt of Windsor, New South Wales, Australia.
4. 1862 - The USS Planter, a steamer and gunship, steals through confederate lines and is passed to the Union, by a southern slave, Robert Smalls, who later was officially appointed as captain, becoming the first man with dark skin to command a United States ship.
5. 1880 - In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison performs the first test of his electric railway.
6. 1940 - World War II: Germany's conquest of France begins as the German army crosses the Meuse. Winston Churchill makes his "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech to the House of Commons.
7. 1958 - Ben Carlin becomes the first (and only) person to circumnavigate the world by amphibious vehicle, having travelled over 17,000 kilometres (11,000 mi) by sea and 62,000 kilometres (39,000 mi) by land during a ten-year journey
8. 1960 - Hundreds of University of California, Berkeley students congregate for the first day of protest against a visit by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Thirty-one students are arrested, and the Free Speech Movement is born.
9. 1989 - Large groups of students occupy Tiananmen Square and begin a hunger strike.
10. 1995 - 33-year-old British mother Alison Hargreaves became the first woman to conquer Everest without oxygen or the help of sherpas.
11. Famous Birthdays: Ole Worm (Danish physician), Alexis Clairaut (French mathematician, astronomer, and geophysicist), Ronald Ross (Indian-English physician, Nobel Prize laureate), Georges Braque (French painter and sculptor), Trevor Baylis (English inventor, invented the wind-up radio)

For famous birthdays and other daily events in history, visit our Daily Dose Activities.

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For more history resources on Internet 4 Classrooms, visit our Social Studies and History index. For Pre K-8th Grade Level History and Social Studies Resources, visit our Grade Level Index.