King Charles II of England grants a permanent charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company, made up of the group of French explorers who opened the lucrative North American fur trade to London merchants. The charter conferred on them not only a trading monopoly but also effective control over the vast region surrounding North America’s Hudson […]

On May 2, 1918, General Motors Corporation (GM), which will become the world’s largest automotive firm, acquires Chevrolet Motor Company. GM had been founded a decade earlier by William C. “Billy” Durant, a former carriage maker from Flint, Michigan, whose Durant-Dort Carriage Company had taken control of the ailing Buick Motor Company. On September 16, […]

Patrick Mahon is arrested on suspicion of murder after showing up at the Waterloo train station in London to claim his bag. He quickly confessed that the bloody knife and case inside were connected to the death of his mistress, Emily Kaye. Mahon then directed the Scotland Yard detectives to a particularly grisly scene in […]

On May 2, 1945, approximately 1 million German soldiers lay down their arms as the terms of the German unconditional surrender, signed at Caserta on April 29, comes into effect. Early this same day, Russian Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov accepts the surrender of the German capital. The Red Army takes 134,000 German soldiers prisoner.

Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) succumbs to illness exacerbated by alcoholism and passes away at age 48. McCarthy had been a key figure in the anticommunist hysteria popularly known as the “Red Scare” that engulfed the United States in the years following World War II. McCarthy was born in a small town in Wisconsin in 1908. […]

On May 2, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, more than 1,000 Black school children march through the city in a demonstration against segregation. The goal of the non-violent demonstration, which became known as the “Children’s Crusade” and “Children’s March,” was to provoke the city’s civic and business leaders to agree to desegregate. Martin Luther King Jr., […]

After nearly five decades as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover dies, leaving the powerful government agency without the administrator who had been largely responsible for its existence and shape. Educated as a lawyer and a librarian, Hoover joined the Department of Justice in 1917 and within two years had […]

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, is killed by U.S. forces during a raid on his compound hideout in Pakistan. The notorious, 54-year-old leader of Al Qaeda, the terrorist network of Islamic extremists, had been the target of a nearly decade-long international manhunt. The raid […]