1852, Samuel Clemens — more famously known as Mark Twain — made his writing debut in the humorous Boston weekly, The Carpet Bag.
1918 Former Tonight Show host Jack Paar is born. He dies in 2004.
1920, the longest baseball game ever played ended after 26 innings in 1-1 tie between the Brooklyn Robins and the Boston Braves.
1923 Author Joseph Heller (Catch-22) is born. He dies in 1999.
1926, Satchel Paige made his pitching debut in the Negro Southern League.
1931, New York City’s 102-story Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world up to that time, was dedicated.
1939 Batman makes his comic book debut in Detective Comics Number 27, in a six-page story called “The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate.”
1940, the 1940 Olympics were canceled because of World War II.
1941, Cheerios cereal was introduced by General Mills.
1941 The movie Citizen Kane, starring Orson Welles, opens.
1945, one day after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, it was announced that Admiral Karl Doenitz had succeeded him as leader of the Third Reich. Seven days later, on May 8th, Doenitz announced Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies.
1948, the People’s Democratic Republic Of Korea — Communist North Korea — was proclaimed.
1954, the Unification Church, whose followers are sometimes called “Moonies,” was established.
1960, the Soviet Union shot down an American U2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.
1963, James W. Whittaker of Redmond, Washington, became the first American to conquer Mount Everest as he and a Sherpa guide reached the summit.
1967, Elvis Presley married Priscilla Ann Beaulieu at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. They divorced in 1973.
1969, Leonard Tose, a trucking executive from Philadelphia, bought the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League for $16,155,000. It was the largest price paid to date for a pro football franchise.
1971, Amtrak, which combined 18 passenger railroads, went into service.
1981, tennis star Billie Jean King disclosed that she had a lesbian affair.
1991, Rickey Henderson of the Oakland A’s broke Lou Brock‘s all-time stolen base record with his 939th steal.
1992, on the third day of the L.A. riots, beaten motorist Rodney King publicly appealed for calm, asking, “Can’t we all just get along?”
1997, John & Patsy Ramsey, the parents of slain child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, declared their innocence in the case, and asked for the public’s help in finding the killer of their six-year-old daughter.
1999, Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic agreed to hand over three captured U.S. soldiers during the Kosovo conflict to the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
2000, About three-and-a-half million Time Warner cable subscribers temporarily lost access to seven Disney-owned ABC stations in a quarrel over transmission rights.
2003, President Bush, on the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, declared that, quote, “major combat operations” had ended in Iraq. Bush delivered the speech with a banner behind him that read “Mission Accomplished,” after arriving on the carrier dressed in a flight suit on a Navy jet.