May 29
1453 - Constantinople fell to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, ending the Byzantine Empire.
1660 - Charles II was restored to the English throne after the Puritan Commonwealth.
1721 - South Carolina was formally incorporated as a royal colony.
1765 - Patrick Henry denounced the Stamp Act before Virginia's House of Burgesses.
1790 - Rhode Island became the last of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1827 - The first nautical school opened in Nantucket, MA, under the name Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin’s Lancasterian School.
1848 - WIsconsin became the 30th state to join the United States.
1849 - A patent for lifting vessels was granted to Abraham Lincoln.
1910 - An airplane raced a train from Albany, NY, to New York City. The airplane pilot Glenn Curtiss won the $10,000 prize.
1912 - Fifteen women were dismissed from their jobs at the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, PA, for dancing the Turkey Trot while on the job.
1916 - The official flag of the president of the United States was adopted.
1916 - U.S. forces invaded Dominican Republic and remained until 1924.
1922 - Ecuador became independent.
1922 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that organized baseball was a sport, not subject to antitrust laws.
1932 - World War I veterans began arriving in Washington, DC. to demand cash bonuses they were not scheduled to receive for another 13 years.
1951 - C.F. Blair became the first man to fly over the North Pole in single engine plane.
1953 - Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became first men to reach the top of Mount Everest.
1962 - Buck (John) O’Neil became the first black coach in major league baseball when he accepted the job with the Chicago Cubs.
1965 - Ralph Boston set a world record in the broad jump at 27-feet, 4-3/4 inches, at a meet held in Modesto, CA.
1973 - Tom Bradley was elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles.
1974 - U.S. President Nixon agreed to turn over 1,200 pages of edited Watergate transcripts.
1978 - In the U.S., postage stamps were raised from 13 cents to 15 cents.
1981 - The U.S. performed a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site.
1985 - Thirty-nine people were killed and 400 were injured in a riot at a European Cup soccer match in Brussels, Belgium.
1986 - Colonel Oliver North told National Security Advisor William McFarlane that profits from weapons sold to Iran were being diverted to the Contras.
1988 - U.S. President Reagan began his first visit to the Soviet Union in Moscow.
1988 - NBC aired "To Heal A Nation," the story of Jan Scruggs' effort to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
1990 - Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic by the Russian parliament.
1997 - The ruling party in Indonesia, Golkar, won the Parliament election by a record margin. There was a boycott movement and rioting that killed 200 people.
1999 - Space shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.
2000 - Fiji's military took control of the nation and declared martial law following a coup attempt by indigenous Fijians in mid-May.
2001 - In New York, four followers of Osama bin Laden were convicted of a global conspiracy to murder Americans. The crimes included the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people.
2001 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disabled golfer Casey Martin could use a cart to ride in tournaments.
2015 - The Obama adminstration removed Cuba from the U.S. terrorism blacklist. The two countries had severed diplomatic relations in January of 1961.
