Word reaches Fray Marcos that Native Americans have killed his guide Estevan, a Black enslaved man who was the first non-Indigenous man to visit the pueblo lands of the American Southwest. Thought to have been born sometime around 1500 on the west coast of Morocco, Estevan was sold to the Spanish as an enslaved worker. […]

The Ashmolean, the world’s first university museum, opens in Oxford, England. At the time of the English Restoration, Oxford was the center of scientific activity in England. In 1677, English archaeologist Elias Ashmole donated his collection of curiosities to Oxford University, and the school’s directors planned the construction of a building to display the items […]

Humanitarians Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons found the American Red Cross, an organization established to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters

On May 21, 1901, Connecticut becomes the first state to pass a law regulating motor vehicles, limiting their speed to 12 mph in cities and 15 mph on country roads. Speed limits had been set earlier in the United States for non-motorized vehicles: In 1652, the colony of New Amsterdam (now New York) issued a […]

On May 21, 1924, 14-year-old Bobby Franks is abducted from a Chicago, Illinois, street and killed in what later proves to be one of the most unusual murders in American history. The killers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were wealthy and intelligent teenagers whose sole motive for killing Franks was the desire to commit the […]

Five years to the day that American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first pilot to accomplish a solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, female aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first pilot to repeat the feat, landing her plane in Ireland after flying across the North Atlantic. Earhart traveled over 2,000 miles from Newfoundland in […]

On May 21, 1940, a “special unit” carries out its mission and begins murdering more than 1,500 hospital patients in East Prussia. The massacre lasted until June 6, 1940. Mentally ill patients from throughout East Prussia had been transferred to the district of Soldau, also in East Prussia. A special military unit, basically a hit […]

The United States conducts the first airborne test of an improved hydrogen bomb, dropping it from a plane over the tiny island of Namu in the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean on May 21, 1956. (Because of the time difference, it was still May 20 in the U.S.) The successful test indicated that hydrogen […]

Amy Fisher, the so-called “Long Island Lolita,” is arrested for shooting Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the front porch of her Massapequa, New York, home. Fisher, only 17 at the time of the shooting, was having an affair with 38-year-old Joey Buttafuoco, Mary Jo’s husband. The tawdry story soon became a tabloid and talk-show fixture, the […]

A three-year-old boy dies of avian influenza in Hong Kong on May 21, 1997. By the time the outbreak was controlled, six people were dead and 1.6 million domestic fowl were destroyed. The young boy, the first victim of the flu outbreak, had been hospitalized six days earlier with severe coughing and fever. He had […]