May 31
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Featured Event
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On this day in 1578, 15 ships and 400 men, led by English mariner Martin Frobisher, set sail from England to the Canadian Arctic. They would return months later with a bounty: 1,225 tons of ore that they believed to be gold. Five years of efforts to prove the treasure’s value later revealed it was nothing but iron pyrite—fool’s gold. [Read today’s edition of Today in History > >]
Featured Biography
Featured Biography
© Paul Smith—Featureflash/Shutterstock.com
Go ahead, make my day.
American film actor Clint Eastwood, born this day in 1930, emerged as one of the most popular Hollywood stars in the 1970s, playing such laconic and dangerous heroes as Dirty Harry, and later became an Oscar-winning director.
Famous Birthdays
More on May 31
Image: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
2009
Millvina Dean, the last known person to have survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, died in Southampton, England; she was nine weeks old at the time of the disaster. [How much do you know about the Titanic?]
AP Images
2005
It was publicly revealed that former FBI official Mark Felt was “Deep Throat,” the anonymous informant at the centre of the Watergate scandal that involved U.S. President Richard Nixon’s administration. [Take our quiz about U.S. political scandals.]
© Rainer Grosskopf—Photodisc/Getty Images
1977
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline—which connected the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay in northern Alaska with the harbour at Valdez, 800 miles (1,300 km) to the south—was completed. [Sort fact from fiction in our oil and natural gas quiz.]
Central Zionist Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; www.ushmm.org
1962
On this day in 1962, the State of Israel hanged German official Adolf Eichmann, who had escaped from a prison camp in 1946 and spent some 14 years in hiding, for his part in the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. [Test your knowledge of infamous Nazis.]
© Jerry Coli/Dreamstime.com
1943
American gridiron football player Joe Namath, who was one of the game’s best passers and a cultural sports icon of the 1960s, was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. [Test your knowledge of football.]
American Red Cross Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-anrc-14738)
1921
The Tulsa race massacre began in Oklahoma as mobs of both African Americans and whites descended on the courthouse where a Black man, who was accused of assaulting a white woman, was being held; in the ensuing violence, Tulsa’s prosperous Black neighbourhood of Greenwood was destroyed and as many as 300 people were killed, mostly African Americans. [Take our quiz about African American history.]
De Agostini Editore/age fotostock
1916
The Battle of Jutland, an encounter between British and German naval fleets in World War I, began. [Sort fact from fiction in our World War I quiz.]
Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Given by W.G. Gardiner and Sir Frederick C. Gardiner 1930
1910
Louis Botha formed the first government of the Union of South Africa. [Test your knowledge of South Africa.]
Photos.com/Thinkstock
1902
The South African War, or Boer War, came to a close with the signing of the Peace of Vereeniging. [Name the African battle in our quiz.]
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
1889
Considered one of the worst natural disasters in American history, a flood ravaged Johnstown, Pennsylvania, causing more than 2,200 deaths. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about natural disasters.]
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
1819
American poet, essayist, and journalist Walt Whitman, whose verse collection Leaves of Grass (1855) is a landmark in American literature, was born on Long Island, New York. [Take our poetry quiz.]
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1790
The United States established copyright law.