May 19: What Happened on This Day in History (High_school Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1649 - An Act of Parliament declaring England a Commonwealth is passed by the Long Parliament. England would be a republic for the next eleven years.
2. 1743 - Jean-Pierre Christin developed the centigrade temperature scale.
3. 1828 - U.S. President John Quincy Adams signs the Tariff of 1828 into law, protecting wool manufacturers in the United States.
4. 1848 - Mexican-American War: Mexico ratifies the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo thus ending the war and ceding California, Nevada, Utah and parts of four other modern-day U.S. states to the United States for US$15 million.
5. 1911 - Parks Canada, the world's first national park service, is established as the Dominion Parks Branch under the Department of the Interior.
6. 1921 - The U.S. Congress passes the Emergency Quota Act establishing national quotas on immigration.
7. 1943 - World War II: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set Monday, May 1, 1944 as the date for the Normandy landings ("D-Day"). It would later be delayed over a month due to bad weather.
8. 1961 - Venera program: Venera 1 becomes the first man-made object to fly-by another planet by passing Venus (the probe had lost contact with Earth a month earlier and did not send back any data).
9. 1963 - The New York Post Sunday Magazine publishes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, drafted shortly after his arrest on April 12th during the Birmingham Campaign advocating for civil rights and an end to segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. The letter was in response to "A Call for Unity": a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen against King and his methods, following his arrest, and became one of the most-anthologized statements of the civil rights movement.
10. 1997 - The Sierra Gorda Biosphere, the most ecologically diverse region in Mexico, is established as a result of grassroots efforts.
11. Famous Birthdays: Johns Hopkins (American businessman and philanthropist), Walter Russell (American painter, sculptor, and author), Max Perutz (Austrian-English biologist, Nobel Prize laureate), Malcolm X (American minister and activist), James Gosling (Canadian-American computer scientist, created Java

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

Click Here for Yesterday in History: May 18

Click Here for Tomorrow in History: May 20

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.