King John I of Portugal and King Richard II of England ratify the Treaty of Windsor at Windsor Castle, formally establishing perpetual friendship and military alliance between the two kingdoms. The treaty builds on the earlier Anglo-Portuguese pacts (the Treaty of Tagilde of 1372 and the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373) and is sealed five months later by the marriage of John I to Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt — the most senior English prince of his generation. Six and a half centuries later, the Treaty of Windsor remains the oldest diplomatic alliance in the world that is still in force, having survived the Hundred Years' War, the Reformation, the Iberian Union, the Napoleonic Wars, the Peninsular War, both World Wars, and decolonisation. Britain has invoked it repeatedly: in the Peninsular War (Wellington's campaign launched from Lisbon, 1808); in both World Wars (Portugal allowed Britain access to the Azores); and as recently as the 1982 Falklands War (Portugal allowed British use of the Lajes airbase). No other treaty between two sovereign states has run continuously for so long.

Christopher Columbus sails from Cádiz, Spain, with four caravels — Capitana, Santiago de Palos, Gallega, and Vizcaína — and about 140 men, including his brother Bartholomew and his thirteen-year-old son Fernando, who later wrote the most detailed surviving account of the expedition. Ill, embittered, and partly out of favour with Ferdinand and Isabella after his disastrous third voyage, Columbus has been forbidden from entering Hispaniola. He tries anyway, is refused entry by Governor Nicolás de Ovando, and sails south to explore Jamaica, the southern coast of Cuba, and the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama — searching in vain for a strait through to the Indian Ocean. Marooned for a year on Jamaica after his ships are destroyed by storms and shipworms, he uses his copy of Regiomontanus's almanac to predict a lunar eclipse on February 29, 1504, terrifying the local Taíno into resupplying his men. He returns to Spain in November 1504 and dies in Valladolid on May 20, 1506 — still convinced he had reached the eastern shores of Asia.

At about 7 a.m., Thomas Blood — an Irish adventurer, Parliamentarian veteran, and serial conspirator — enters the Tower of London disguised as a clergyman and very nearly makes off with the Crown Jewels of England. Over weeks, "Parson Ayliffe" had cultivated the friendship of Talbot Edwards, the Assistant Keeper of the Jewels, even pretending to negotiate a marriage between his fictitious nephew and Edwards's daughter. Blood arrives that morning with three accomplices (one of them his son), overpowers Edwards with a wooden mallet, flattens St Edward's Crown to hide it under a clergyman's cloak, stuffs the Sovereign's Orb down his breeches, and sets a confederate sawing the Sceptre with the Cross in two — when Edwards's soldier-son returns home unexpectedly and raises the alarm. The gang is caught at the Iron Gate. In one of the most baffling acts of royal clemency in English history, King Charles II not only pardons Blood but restores his Irish estates and grants him an annual pension of £500. Historians still argue why — espionage favours, royal whim, or simple amusement at Blood's audacity. It remains the only known attempt at the Crown Jewels in nearly 700 years of their being kept in the Tower.

Benjamin Franklin publishes "Join, or Die" in his Pennsylvania Gazette in Philadelphia. The crude woodcut depicts a snake severed into eight pieces, each labelled with the initials of an American colony or region: N.E. (the four New England colonies), N.Y., N.J., P., M., V., N.C., S.C. — Georgia and Delaware are pointedly omitted. Franklin printed it to rally the colonies behind his Albany Plan of Union for collective defence against the French and their Native American allies on the eve of the French and Indian War. The cartoon plays on a popular folk belief that a snake cut into pieces would come back to life if the segments were rejoined before sunset. It is generally regarded as the first political cartoon published in America. Reprinted obsessively in colonial newspapers in the 1760s and 1770s — by which time its meaning had shifted from "unite against the French" to "unite against the British" — it became one of the most enduring icons in American political graphics. The Gadsden flag of 1775 and the modern "Don't Tread on Me" snake imagery descend directly from it.

The Vienna Stock Exchange (Wiener Börse) collapses after weeks of speculative frenzy in railway shares, real-estate construction in the Ringstrasse, and shaky new banks — wiping out fortunes and triggering what would become known as the Gründerkrach ("Founders' Crash"). The shock wave spreads across Europe, and by September 1873 it reaches New York with the failure of Jay Cooke & Company — the financier of the Northern Pacific Railway and the second-largest investment bank in the United States — closing the New York Stock Exchange for ten days for the first time in its history. The resulting Long Depression lasts six years in the United States (1873–1879) and over twenty years in parts of Europe. It triggered the Specie Resumption Act, the silver-vs-gold "Crime of '73" controversy that produced William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" politics two decades later, the collapse of Reconstruction, and the rise of the Populist movement. Until the Great Depression of 1929, contemporaries called it simply "the Great Depression."

"Buffalo Bill" Cody — born William Frederick Cody, U.S. Army scout and former buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad — opens his "Wild West" show at Earl's Court, London, as the centrepiece of the American Exhibition tied to Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Annie Oakley shoots the heart out of a playing card; Sitting Bull's nephews ride; the Deadwood Stagecoach is attacked and rescued; cowboys rope steers; a band of real Native Americans, including Lakota Sioux who had fought at Little Bighorn eleven years earlier, ride alongside Buffalo Bill himself. Queen Victoria attends a command performance on May 11 — her first public appearance at a theatrical event since the death of Prince Albert in 1861, twenty-six years earlier — and reportedly calls Annie Oakley "a very, very clever little girl." Buffalo Bill's show essentially invents the "Western" genre and shapes the romanticised image of the American frontier in Europe for two generations. By the time the show winds up in the 1910s, it has played to more than 50 million paying spectators across Europe and North America.

The City of Palo Alto, California, is incorporated, two years after the founding of nearby Stanford University in 1891. The town's name — Spanish for "tall tree" — comes from a 1,083-year-old coast redwood (El Palo Alto) on San Francisquito Creek beside which Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá camped in 1769. From those quiet origins, Palo Alto would in the 20th century become the geographic and intellectual cradle of Silicon Valley. In 1939, Stanford engineering graduates William Hewlett and David Packard founded HP in a Palo Alto garage at 367 Addison Avenue — now California Historical Landmark No. 976 and widely called "the Birthplace of Silicon Valley." Subsequent Palo Alto–based or Palo Alto–founded companies have included Xerox PARC (where the personal computer, the laser printer, the GUI, the mouse, and Ethernet were demonstrated in the 1970s), Tesla, PayPal, VMware, Skype, and Theranos; venture-capital firms Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Andreessen Horowitz are headquartered along nearby Sand Hill Road. The original El Palo Alto redwood is still alive on the city's northern boundary, age now over 1,000 years.

The new Commonwealth of Australia — federated on January 1, 1901, from the six former British colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania — opens its first national parliament in the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. Prince George (the future King George V) presides over the ceremony on behalf of his father, King Edward VII, before some 12,000 invited guests. The first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, leads a Cabinet of nine. Tom Roberts's vast painting of the opening ceremony — known as "The Big Picture," 17 feet long with more than 250 individually painted portraits — is one of the largest historical paintings ever produced in Australia and now hangs in Parliament House, Canberra. Melbourne hosted the federal parliament until 1927, when on May 9 — exactly 26 years to the day after the Melbourne ceremony — Australia's parliament met for the first time in the new Old Parliament House in Canberra, the planned national capital chosen as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne.

On Saturday, May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signs Presidential Proclamation 1268 designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day, "as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country." The proclamation acts on a joint resolution of Congress passed the previous day. The very next day, Sunday May 10, 1914, becomes the first official national Mother's Day. The campaign was the work of Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia, who had been pushing for the holiday since 1907 in memory of her own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis — a Civil War-era nurse and community organiser who had died, by coincidence, on May 9, 1905. Tradition in the Jarvis family was to wear a white carnation if your mother had died and a red one if she was living. Mother's Day is now observed in roughly 50 countries on the second Sunday in May. Anna Jarvis spent the rest of her life turning violently against the holiday she had created, denouncing what she called the "Hallmarkers" who commercialised it; she was arrested in 1948, age 84, for disturbing the peace at a Mother's Day convention in Philadelphia, and died penniless in a sanatorium two years later.

At 12:37 a.m. on May 9, 1926, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd Jr. and Chief Aviation Pilot Floyd Bennett take off from Kings Bay, Spitsbergen, in the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, in a Fokker F.VIIa/3m tri-motor monoplane named Josephine Ford — after the young daughter of Edsel Ford, who, with John D. Rockefeller Jr., had financed the expedition. After about 8 hours and 25 minutes of flight, Byrd's instruments show they have reached the North Pole at 9:02 a.m. They circle three times and turn for home, landing back in Spitsbergen at 4:34 p.m. after about 15 hours and 57 minutes aloft. Both men are awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor by special act of Congress. The 1996 release of Byrd's flight diary — with erased-but-still-legible sextant readings — has cast serious doubt on whether they actually reached the Pole; many polar historians now believe they fell about 150 miles short. If so, credit for the first verified flight over the North Pole goes to the airship Norge, piloted by Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth, and Umberto Nobile, on May 12, 1926 — three days later, from the same Spitsbergen airfield. The Josephine Ford is preserved today at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

From the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proclaims the formal annexation of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) into the Kingdom of Italy and the assumption by King Victor Emmanuel III of the title "Emperor of Ethiopia." Marshal Pietro Badoglio is made Viceroy and Duke of Addis Ababa. Italian forces had captured the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on May 5; Emperor Haile Selassie had fled into exile via Djibouti and Jerusalem. The Second Italo-Ethiopian War (October 3, 1935 – May 9, 1936) was marked by extensive Italian use of mustard gas against civilian and military targets in defiance of the Geneva Protocol. The League of Nations failed to enforce meaningful sanctions; Italy left the League in 1937. Selassie's June 30, 1936 speech to the League of Nations — the first ever delivered there by a head of state — included his famous warning: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." Ethiopia would be liberated by British, Commonwealth, and Ethiopian Patriot forces in May 1941; Selassie returned to Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941 — exactly five years after fleeing.

In the North Atlantic south of Iceland, Royal Navy destroyers HMS Bulldog and HMS Broadway, escorting Convoy OB 318, depth-charge the German submarine U-110 to the surface. Its commander, Fritz-Julius Lemp — the same officer who had sunk the passenger liner Athenia on the first day of the war in 1939 — abandons ship believing she will sink. She does not. A boarding party from Bulldog led by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme rows over and recovers a fully intact, four-rotor naval Enigma machine, the U-boat's Enigma codebooks, and the bigram tables for setting the daily key — the most valuable single intelligence haul of the Battle of the Atlantic. The capture is kept absolutely secret; U-110 sinks while under tow the next day, allowing the Kriegsmarine to assume she had been lost with all hands and her secrets gone with her. The Bletchley Park codebreakers, led by Alan Turing, used the U-110 material to break the Kriegsmarine's Hydra and Triton naval Enigma keys; Allied convoy losses in the North Atlantic fell sharply. Winston Churchill called the broken Enigma traffic "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled." The Hollywood film "U-571" (2000) is a fictionalised retelling — with the captors changed to Americans, an inversion that prompted a formal protest from the British government.

On May 8, 1945, at 22:43 Central European Time, in the German Military Engineering School in Berlin-Karlshorst, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signs the definitive Act of Military Surrender of all German armed forces — in the presence of Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Allied Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, and witnesses from the United States and France. Because of the time-zone difference, it is already 00:43 on May 9 in Moscow when the surrender takes effect. Stalin declares May 9 the Day of Victory of the Soviet People in the Great Patriotic War. At 02:10 a.m. Moscow time, the legendary Soviet radio announcer Yuri Levitan announces the surrender to a sleepless USSR. Across the Soviet Union — and across the British and American capitals on May 8 — V-E Day celebrations erupt. The first Moscow Victory Parade is held in Red Square on June 24, 1945, with 200 captured German battle standards thrown at the foot of Lenin's Mausoleum. Approximately 27 million Soviet citizens died in the war. From 1948 to 1964 May 9 was an ordinary working day in the USSR; Leonid Brezhnev reinstated it as a major national holiday on the 20th anniversary in 1965, and it remains today the most emotionally important national holiday in Russia.

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, an American pulp-fiction writer best known until then for stories in John W. Campbell's "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine, publishes "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health" through Hermitage House. The book introduces "Dianetics" — a system Hubbard claims can erase traumatic "engrams" from a "reactive mind" and produce a state of optimal rationality he calls "Clear." It is an immediate publishing sensation, climbs to the New York Times bestseller list within weeks, and stays there for 26 consecutive weeks. By 1953 Hubbard had expanded the system into a religion; he founded the Church of Scientology in Camden, New Jersey, on December 18, 1953. Dianetics has since sold tens of millions of copies and remains the foundational text of Scientology. Coincidentally, the same May 1950 issue of "Astounding Science Fiction" that carried Hubbard's original Dianetics article — published the month before — also contained work by Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt, and L. Sprague de Camp; it is one of the most consequential single issues in the history of American genre publishing.

Exactly ten years after the unconditional German surrender that ended the Second World War in Europe, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) becomes a full member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The decision had been negotiated through the Paris Agreements of October 1954; the United States, Britain, and France had formally ended their occupation of West Germany on May 5, 1955. West German rearmament under Western command had been the central security debate of the early Cold War, opposed in France and feared in Moscow but pressed by Washington as the only credible answer to Soviet conventional superiority on the central European front. The Soviet response was almost instantaneous: on May 14, 1955 — five days after West Germany's NATO accession — the USSR and seven Eastern Bloc states signed the Warsaw Treaty in the Polish capital, founding the Warsaw Pact. The Cold War's two great opposing military alliances were now fully formed; the structure they created would shape European geopolitics until the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved in March 1991. After German reunification in October 1990, the territory of the former East Germany itself joined NATO.

The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr. (D-NJ), opens formal public impeachment hearings against President Richard M. Nixon over the Watergate scandal. The committee proceedings, televised and watched by tens of millions of Americans, would conclude on July 27, 29, and 30 with three articles of impeachment voted out: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. On July 24, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon that the President must release the White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor; the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, released on August 5, demonstrated that Nixon had ordered the FBI to halt its Watergate investigation just six days after the break-in. Faced with certain impeachment by the full House and conviction by the Senate, Nixon resigned at noon on August 9, 1974 — the only U.S. president to do so in 235 years of the office. Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president the same day; he pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974. The phrase "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" — first asked by Senator Howard Baker (R-TN) at the parallel Senate hearings — became a constitutional template for executive accountability inquiries ever since.

The body of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, riddled with eleven bullet wounds, is found in the trunk of a red Renault 4 abandoned on Via Michelangelo Caetani in central Rome — about 150 metres from the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and roughly the same distance from the headquarters of the Christian Democracy (DC) party Moro had led. The choice of resting place was symbolic. Moro, then president of the Christian Democrats and a five-time prime minister of Italy, had been kidnapped on Via Fani in Rome on March 16, 1978 — the same morning his "Historic Compromise" coalition between the DC and the PCI was to be presented in Parliament. His five bodyguards had been killed in the ambush. After 55 days of captivity and a sham "people's trial" by the far-left Red Brigades, with the Italian state, the Vatican, and Pope Paul VI (Moro's personal friend) refusing to negotiate the release of 13 Red Brigade members, Moro was murdered in the morning of May 9 and his body driven to its symbolic resting place between the two parties whose alliance he had been building. His murder is the defining act of Italy's "Years of Lead" (Anni di Piombo), the long, low-grade political war between far-left, far-right, and state forces from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Moro's wife observed his wish, expressed during captivity, that no Italian politicians attend his funeral.

President Donald Trump abruptly dismisses FBI Director James B. Comey, who is then in Los Angeles addressing FBI agents and learns of his firing from a television screen behind him in the room. Trump's letter cites recommendations by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, both of whom had pointed to Comey's handling of the 2016 Hillary Clinton email investigation; but Trump told NBC's Lester Holt two days later that he had been thinking of "this Russia thing" when he made the decision. The firing came in the middle of the FBI's active counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign. Within eight days, on May 17, 2017, Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III as Special Counsel to take over the Russia investigation; Mueller's 448-page report, delivered on March 22, 2019, would document extensive Russian interference, decline to reach a conclusion on whether the Trump campaign had criminally conspired, and decline to exonerate the President of obstruction of justice. Comey published his account, "A Higher Loyalty," in 2018. He is only the second FBI director ever dismissed by a sitting U.S. president; the first was William S. Sessions, fired by Bill Clinton in 1993 over an ethics dispute.

Gaspard Monge, born in Beaune, Burgundy, the son of a knife-grinder — the French mathematician, engineer, educator, and revolutionary who founded descriptive geometry and was one of the principal scientific figures of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period. While a young draughtsman at the École royale du génie de Mézières in 1768, he developed the methods of descriptive geometry, a graphical technique for representing three-dimensional objects in two dimensions that became the foundation of architectural drawing, engineering design, and military fortification — the technique was so important that the French War Ministry classified it as a state secret for thirty years. He was a key organiser of the foundational scientific institutions of revolutionary France: the École Normale (1794) and, with Lazare Carnot, the École Polytechnique (1794), which he led for many years and shaped into the model technical university of the 19th-century world. Briefly Minister of the Marine in 1792, he co-signed the death warrant of King Louis XVI. He accompanied Napoleon's 1798 expedition to Egypt as scientific director and was made Comte de Péluse by the Emperor in 1808. Following the Bourbon Restoration, he was stripped of his honours and dismissed from the Académie des Sciences; he died in Paris on July 28, 1818. His name is one of the 72 inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.

John Brown, born in Torrington, Connecticut, the son of Owen and Ruth (Mills) Brown. The family moved to Hudson, Ohio, in 1805, where Owen ran a tannery and at one point employed Jesse Grant, the father of the future Union commanding general and 18th U.S. president, Ulysses S. Grant. A militant evangelical Calvinist who came to believe himself an "instrument of God" raised to strike a "death blow" to American slavery, Brown led the bloody "Pottawatomie Massacre" of pro-slavery settlers in Bleeding Kansas in 1856 and then planned and led the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859, with a band of 21 men, intending to seize arms and trigger a general slave insurrection across the South. The raid was crushed within 36 hours by U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, with Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart at his side — both of whom would within two years be in Confederate uniform. Brown was captured, tried by Virginia for treason, insurrection, and murder, and hanged at Charles Town on December 2, 1859. His conduct at trial — calm, eloquent, biblical — and the famous prophecy he handed his jailer ("I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood") electrified Northern abolitionists. The marching song "John Brown's Body" became, with lyrics rewritten by Julia Ward Howe in November 1861, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" — the unofficial anthem of the Union Army. His Harpers Ferry raid is widely regarded as the most direct catalyst of the American Civil War.

James Matthew Barrie, born in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland — the ninth of ten children of David Barrie, a handloom weaver, and Margaret Ogilvy. The early death of his elder brother David at age 13, in an ice-skating accident, was the great trauma of Barrie's childhood and the inspiration for his lifelong fascination with "the boy who would not grow up." He read at Edinburgh University, became a successful novelist (A Window in Thrums, 1889) and playwright (The Admirable Crichton, 1902), and his friendship with the five young Llewelyn Davies brothers in London's Kensington Gardens — whom he eventually adopted after the deaths of their parents — inspired the character of Peter Pan, who first appeared in Barrie's 1902 novel "The Little White Bird" and then, on December 27, 1904, in the Christmas play "Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up" at the Duke of York's Theatre, London. Barrie was created a baronet in 1913 and made a member of the Order of Merit in 1922. He died in London on June 19, 1937. As a philanthropic act, in 1929 he donated the entire copyright to "Peter Pan" — including all stage, film, broadcast, and merchandise rights — to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. Through a special clause in the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the hospital still receives royalties from "Peter Pan" performances and merchandise in perpetuity within the United Kingdom — an extraordinary literary bequest unique in English-language publishing.

Henry John Kaiser, born in Sprout Brook, New York, to German immigrant parents — the self-made American industrial titan who founded more than 100 companies, including Kaiser Aluminum, Kaiser Steel, Kaiser Cement & Gypsum, Kaiser Engineers, Kaiser Motors, and the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan (today Kaiser Permanente). His Six Companies consortium built the Hoover Dam (1936), the Bonneville Dam (1937), and the Grand Coulee Dam (1942). During the Second World War his shipyards on the West Coast — at Richmond and Sausalito in California, and at Vancouver and Portland in Oregon — built more than 1,400 Liberty and Victory cargo ships, applying mass-production methods to shipbuilding and slashing build times from over 200 days to as little as four. The publicity-stunt record, set in November 1942 at the Richmond Yard No. 2, was the SS Robert E. Peary — keel laid to launch in 4 days, 15 hours, 29 minutes. Kaiser pioneered prepaid medical care for his shipyard workers, building the country's first integrated health-maintenance organisation; the Permanente Foundation became Kaiser Permanente in 1945, today one of the largest non-profit healthcare systems in the United States with more than 12 million members. He died on August 24, 1967, in Honolulu, Hawaii, age 85.

Myron Leon "Mike" Wallace, born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents (the family name was originally Wallik). He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1939 and served as a U.S. Navy communications officer in the Second World War. After hosting radio and TV interview shows and quiz programmes through the 1950s, he joined CBS News in 1963. From the very first broadcast of "60 Minutes" on September 24, 1968, Wallace was its co-editor and lead correspondent — a role he held for 38 seasons until his retirement in 2006, the longest run by any single correspondent on a single news programme in American television history. Famous for his confrontational interviewing style — subjects spoke of suffering "Mike fright" — he conducted some of the most consequential journalism of the era, including the 1995–96 interview with tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand of Brown & Williamson (the basis of Michael Mann's 1999 film "The Insider"); the 1982 CBS Reports special "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception" with General William Westmoreland (which led to a major libel suit, withdrawn in 1985); and interviews with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vladimir Putin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Salvador Dalí, Frank Lloyd Wright, and seven U.S. presidents. He won 21 Primetime Emmy Awards. He died on April 7, 2012, age 93, in New Canaan, Connecticut. His son, Chris Wallace, is also a prominent journalist (Fox News, CNN).

Sophia Magdalena Scholl, born in Forchtenberg, Württemberg — the German student activist and martyr who became, with her older brother Hans, the public face of the White Rose (Weiße Rose) — a small, non-violent resistance group of Munich students and one professor, Kurt Huber, that distributed six leaflets and painted graffiti calling on Germans to oppose Hitler's regime, the Holocaust, and the war on the Eastern Front. Sophie joined the group in summer 1942 after discovering her brother's involvement; she was a 21-year-old biology and philosophy student at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. On February 18, 1943, after distributing the sixth leaflet in the atrium of the university, Sophie and Hans were spotted by the building's caretaker Jakob Schmid and arrested by the Gestapo. After four days of interrogation by inspector Robert Mohr — to whom Sophie reportedly said, "You see, my view is that I did the best thing I could do for my people. I therefore do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences" — Sophie, Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst were tried by the People's Court under the notorious Nazi judge Roland Freisler on February 22, 1943, found guilty of high treason, and beheaded by guillotine that same afternoon at Stadelheim Prison. Sophie was 21 years old. Her last reported words, to Hans before her execution: "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give themselves up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go." Today she is one of the most honoured women in modern German memory; school buildings, streets, and university squares across Germany bear her name.

Richard Alonzo "Pancho" Gonzales, born in Los Angeles, California, to Mexican-American parents. Largely self-taught, banned from junior tennis circuits for school truancy, he won the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills in 1948 (age 20) and 1949, then turned professional and dominated the closed pre-Open-era pro tour through the 1950s, holding the world No. 1 ranking for an unmatched eight years. Most tennis historians regard him as one of the greatest players of all time and certainly the greatest of the pre-Open era; his serve was widely judged the best in the history of the men's game until John McEnroe and Pete Sampras. After the 1968 introduction of the Open Era, the 41-year-old Gonzales returned to Wimbledon in 1969 and beat 25-year-old Charlie Pasarell in 5 hours 12 minutes, 22–24, 1–6, 16–14, 6–3, 11–9 — for many years the longest singles match in Wimbledon history, and the proximate cause of the introduction of tiebreaks in tennis. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1968. He married six times — including to actress Madelyn Darrow and to Rita Agassi, sister of Andre Agassi — and died on July 3, 1995, in Las Vegas, age 67, of stomach cancer.

Albert Finney, born in Salford, Lancashire, England — the son of a bookmaker. One of the great British screen actors of his generation, he received five Oscar nominations across four decades: Best Actor for Tony Richardson's "Tom Jones" (1963), the Henry Fielding adaptation that won Best Picture; Best Actor for Sidney Lumet's "Murder on the Orient Express" (1974), in which he played Hercule Poirot; Best Actor for Peter Yates's "The Dresser" (1983), opposite Tom Courtenay; Best Actor for John Huston's "Under the Volcano" (1984); and Best Supporting Actor for Steven Soderbergh's "Erin Brockovich" (2000), opposite Julia Roberts. He won three BAFTAs and two Golden Globes. He famously turned down a knighthood in 2000, having earlier turned down a CBE — calling honours "pretty ridiculous" and "perpetuating a class system that I disapprove of." His later career included Tim Burton's "Big Fish" (2003), the Bourne films "The Bourne Ultimatum" (2007) and "The Bourne Legacy" (2012), and Sam Mendes's "Skyfall" (2012), in which he played the Bond family's Scottish gamekeeper Kincade — his last screen role. He died of a chest infection on February 7, 2019, age 82, in London.

Glenda May Jackson, born in Birkenhead, Merseyside, England — the daughter of a builder. She is one of only six actors in Academy Awards history to have won two Best Actress Oscars: for Ken Russell's "Women in Love" (1970), the D. H. Lawrence adaptation, and for Melvin Frank's "A Touch of Class" (1973), opposite George Segal. She also won three Emmys for the BBC television series "Elizabeth R" (1971), in which she played Queen Elizabeth I. At the height of her acting career — and amid much public bemusement — she stood for and won election as the Labour Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Highgate in the 1992 general election, serving for 23 years through 2015 (latterly as MP for Hampstead and Kilburn). She delivered a fiercely critical House of Commons speech on the day of Margaret Thatcher's memorial debate in 2013 ("a woman, but not on my terms") that became one of the most-watched parliamentary speeches in modern Hansard. Returning to the stage at age 80, in 2016, she played King Lear at the Old Vic in London — only the third woman in modern times to play Lear in a major production. She won a Tony Award for "Three Tall Women" on Broadway in 2018. She died at her home in Blackheath, London, on June 15, 2023, age 87.

Candice Patricia Bergen, born in Beverly Hills, California, to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen — one of the biggest American radio stars of the 1930s and 1940s — and former model Frances Westerman. As a child, she shared a household with the famously sharp-tongued ventriloquist's dummy Charlie McCarthy, to whom her father Edgar Bergen left $10,000 in his will (a wry joke that became part of pop-culture lore). After early film roles in "The Group" (1966) and "Carnal Knowledge" (1971), and her Oscar-nominated turn in Alan J. Pakula's "Starting Over" (1979), she found her defining role at age 42 as the title character of CBS's "Murphy Brown" (1988–1998, with a 2018 revival), playing a hard-charging, recently divorced TV news anchor at a Washington bureau called FYI. The show won her five Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes; in 1992 it became briefly entangled in U.S. presidential politics when Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the show for "ignoring the importance of fathers" after Murphy Brown had a child as a single mother — a critique the writers folded into the next season's plotline. Later notable roles include the recurring part of family-law partner Shirley Schmidt on "Boston Legal" (2005–2008), for which she won an Emmy nomination, and the lead role in the long-running Sex and the City franchise as the wedding planner Enid Frick. She has been married twice: to French film director Louis Malle (1980 until his death in 1995) and to New York real-estate developer Marshall Rose since 2000.

Joy Harjo, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma — an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the great-great-granddaughter of the celebrated 19th-century Muscogee leader Monahwee. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe at age 16, completed her undergraduate degree at the University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1978. Her major poetry collections include "She Had Some Horses" (1983), "In Mad Love and War" (1990, American Book Award), "The Woman Who Fell from the Sky" (1994), "How We Became Human" (2002), "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings" (2015), and "An American Sunrise" (2019). She is also a saxophonist, playwright, two-time memoirist ("Crazy Brave," 2012; "Poet Warrior," 2021), and editor of the Norton anthology "When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through" (2020). On June 19, 2019, the Librarian of Congress named her the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States — the first Native American to hold the position in its 82-year history; she was reappointed for a second term in April 2020 and a third term in November 2020, becoming only the second Poet Laureate ever to serve three terms (after Robert Pinsky). Her signature project, "Living Nations, Living Words," is an interactive ArcGIS map of contemporary Native poets across the United States. Her poetry is included on a plaque aboard NASA's Lucy spacecraft, launched in fall 2021 on a 12-year mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids — meaning her words will be carried through the solar system long after her lifetime. She received Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2023.

Rosario Isabel Dawson, born in New York City to teenage mother Isabel Celeste, of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent — discovered as a 15-year-old on a Lower East Side stoop and cast in Larry Clark's controversial debut "Kids" (1995), written by a teenage Harmony Korine. Her films include Spike Lee's "He Got Game" (1998) and "25th Hour" (2002); the comic-book adaptation "Sin City" (2005, with a 2014 sequel); the musical "Rent" (2005), in which she played Mimi Marquez; "Men in Black II" (2002); "Daredevil" (2003); the romantic comedy "Trance" (2013); and Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" (2007). On television she has voiced Wonder Woman in DC animated films (since 2014) and played the live-action Ahsoka Tano — the Togruta Jedi from Star Wars: The Clone Wars — in "The Mandalorian" (2020), "The Book of Boba Fett" (2022), and the spin-off series "Ahsoka" (2023). Off-screen, in 2004 she co-founded Voto Latino with the journalist María Teresa Kumar, an organisation now claimed to have registered more than 2 million young Latino voters in U.S. elections. Dawson has been outspoken on Native American sovereignty, human-rights, and Hispanic political issues for over two decades.

William Bradford died in Plymouth, Massachusetts, age 67. Born in Yorkshire, England in 1590, orphaned as a boy, he was a separatist Puritan from his teens and one of the leaders of the Pilgrim community that sailed from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower in September 1620. After the death of John Carver in April 1621, Bradford was elected governor of the Plymouth Colony — and was re-elected to that office 30 separate times between 1621 and 1656, guiding it from a precarious settlement of fewer than 50 survivors of its first winter into a stable Puritan polity. His manuscript "Of Plymouth Plantation" (written 1630–1651) is the foundational document of early New England history and the principal source for the modern American story of the Mayflower Compact, the First Thanksgiving (autumn 1621), and the early relationship between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Confederacy under Massasoit. The manuscript was lost during the American Revolution, when British forces sacked the Old South Meeting House library in Boston; not rediscovered until 1855, when an American researcher found it in the library of the Bishop of London at Fulham Palace. It was returned to Massachusetts in 1897 and is today held by the Massachusetts State Library at the State House in Boston. Bradford's phrase "we shall be as a city upon a hill" — actually borrowed from John Winthrop's 1630 sermon, but often attributed to the Pilgrims — would be quoted by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as a foundational image of the American national mission.

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller died of pneumonia in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar, age 45. Born in Marbach am Neckar on November 10, 1759, he was, with his close friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of the two giants of German Classicism (Weimarer Klassik). His major works include "Die Räuber" ("The Robbers," 1781), the Sturm-und-Drang play that made his reputation; "Don Carlos" (1787); the "Wallenstein" trilogy (1798–99); "Maria Stuart" (1800); the play of free Switzerland "Wilhelm Tell" (1804); and the 1785 poem "An die Freude" ("Ode to Joy"). He was made professor of history at the University of Jena in 1789. His "Ode to Joy" became the text Beethoven set in the choral final movement of his Ninth Symphony (1824) — and is now, in instrumental form, the official anthem of the European Union and the Council of Europe; it is performed every May 9 across the Union as part of Europe Day, an unintended 200-year echo from a man who died exactly 145 years before Robert Schuman read his founding declaration. Frederick Douglass called Schiller "the Poet of Freedom"; Hegel called him "the great German." His skull was famously mislaid for two centuries and only definitively reunited with his grave by DNA analysis in 2008 — only to be found, on more careful analysis, not to be Schiller's skull at all.

Albert Abraham Michelson died in Pasadena, California, age 78. Born in Strelno, Prussia (now Strzelno, Poland), in 1852, brought to the United States as a small child, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1873 and taught physics there until 1881. His 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment in Cleveland, Ohio — performed with chemist Edward W. Morley using a remarkably sensitive interferometer of his own invention to detect the Earth's motion through the supposed luminiferous aether — produced a famously null result that overturned classical physics and became one of the foundational empirical inputs to Albert Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein himself praised it as "the most beautiful experiment in the world" and "the starting point of the theory of relativity." For his "optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid," Michelson was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics — the first American to win a Nobel Prize in any of the sciences. He spent his last decades measuring the speed of light with progressively higher precision; his last set of measurements, on a 22-mile evacuated tube on Mount San Antonio in California, were published posthumously. He also made the first definitive measurement of the diameter of a star (Betelgeuse, 1920) using stellar interferometry. He served as the first head of the physics department at the University of Chicago.

Walter Philip Reuther, the most influential American labour leader of the 20th century after Samuel Gompers, died in a Lear Jet crash near Pellston Regional Airport in northern Michigan, age 62, en route to a UAW education centre at Black Lake. Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1907 to a German-American socialist family, he and his brother Victor visited the Soviet Union in 1933 and worked at the Gorky Auto Plant before turning sharply against communism in the late 1930s. He led the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from 1946 until his death; under his presidency the UAW won, in successive contracts with the "Big Three" American automakers, the cost-of-living escalator, the supplemental unemployment benefit, the company-paid pension, the company-paid health plan, and the 30-year retirement — an entire architecture of postwar middle-class American life that economists often summarised as "the Treaty of Detroit." He was a major figure in the American civil-rights coalition and stood close to Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the August 28, 1963 March on Washington — and was the principal source of bail money for King's arrests in Birmingham. He had survived two assassination attempts in 1948 and 1949 (the second permanently weakening his right arm); a 1976 Senate investigation into the May 9, 1970 plane crash found mechanical failure to be the most probable cause but did not entirely rule out foul play. His memorial service in Detroit drew Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Coretta Scott King, and tens of thousands of mourners.

Talat Mahmood died in Bombay (Mumbai), India, age 74. Born in Lucknow on February 24, 1924, into a conservative Muslim household that disapproved of his musical interests, he was the foremost ghazal singer in Indian film music — universally called "Shahenshah-e-Ghazal" ("the King of Ghazals") — known for his soft, velvety, slightly tremulous voice (his nicknames in the press were "the Velvet Voice of India" and "the Perfect Gentleman"). After early success on All India Radio, Lucknow, in 1939 (age 16), he signed with HMV and reached national fame with the non-film ghazal "Tasveer Teri Dil Mera Behla Na Sakegi" (1944). He moved to Bombay in 1949; his breakthrough Bollywood song was "Ae dil mujhe aisi jagah le chal jahan koi na ho" from "Arzoo" (1950), composed by Anil Biswas and filmed on Dilip Kumar. He recorded approximately 800 songs across more than four decades, in twelve languages, and was the playback voice for Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Raj Kapoor, Sunil Dutt, and Bharat Bhushan; classic numbers include "Ae mere dil kahin aur chal" ("Daag," 1952), "Jalte hain jiske liye" ("Sujata," 1959), and "Phir wohi shaam, wohi gham" ("Jahan Ara," 1964). He also acted in 13 Hindi films opposite leading ladies including Suraiya, Nutan, Mala Sinha, Shyama, and Nadira. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1992. India Post issued a commemorative postage stamp in his honour in 2016. Pakistani ghazal great Mehdi Hasan, who later became a "Shahenshah-e-Ghazal" in his own right, started his career in 1957 by singing two Talat Mahmood songs at a Karachi public performance.

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne died in New York City, age 92. Born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, she began performing at the Cotton Club at age 16, became the first African-American performer to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio (MGM in 1942), and broke colour barriers on Broadway, in nightclubs, and on early television. Her best-known films are "Cabin in the Sky" (1943) and "Stormy Weather" (1943) — her signature song was the Harold Arlen / Ted Koehler title number from the latter. MGM's policy was to film her musical numbers in such a way that they could be cut out for distribution in the segregated American South; the result was that she rarely had real character roles. Blacklisted by the McCarthy era for her ties to Paul Robeson and her civil-rights activism, she fought back through nightclub and concert work — and triumphantly returned to Hollywood and Broadway in the 1970s and 1980s. Her one-woman Broadway show "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music" (1981–82) won her a special Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award and ran for 333 performances — at the time the longest-running solo show in Broadway history. She was a confidant of Eleanor Roosevelt, helped sue a chain of restaurants for refusing to serve her, and stood prominently with Martin Luther King Jr. and at the August 1963 March on Washington. She received the NAACP Spingarn Medal (1983), the Kennedy Center Honors (1984), and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1989).

Europe Day is observed annually on May 9 across all 27 member states of the European Union and across many candidate and partner countries — including Kosovo, Moldova, North Macedonia, and Ukraine — to commemorate the Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950, the founding act of European integration. EU institutions in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg open their doors to the public; the Council of the European Union flies the EU flag in capitals across the Union; the iconic "Ode to Joy," set by Beethoven to Friedrich Schiller's 1785 poem (Schiller himself died on May 9, 1805), is performed as the anthem of Europe. Note: the Council of Europe — a separate body, founded May 5, 1949, in Strasbourg, with 46 member states including non-EU countries such as the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey — celebrates its own Europe Day on May 5. The EU's May 9 was formally designated by the Milan Council of June 1985, and the date was chosen for its precise historical significance: it is the anniversary of the Salon de l'Horloge press conference at which Robert Schuman, in five paragraphs of carefully crafted prose, set the postwar European project on the road to economic, political, and ultimately monetary union.

Victory Day is observed on May 9 in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel (where it is recognised by parliamentary act), and several other countries — to mark the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. The German Instrument of Surrender was signed in Berlin-Karlshorst at 22:43 Central European Time on May 8, 1945; that was already 00:43 on May 9 in Moscow, hence the day-of difference between the Western V-E Day (May 8) and the Soviet/Russian Victory Day (May 9). The first Moscow Victory Parade in Red Square was held on June 24, 1945; from 1965 onward, May 9 has been observed as a national holiday with parades that include thousands of marching troops, columns of historic and modern military equipment, and overflights by Russian Air Force jets. The "Immortal Regiment" civic procession, in which ordinary citizens carry portraits of relatives who served or died in the Great Patriotic War, has spread since 2012 to dozens of countries with significant post-Soviet diasporas. Approximately 27 million Soviet citizens died in the war — by far the heaviest national death toll of any combatant nation.

Maharana Pratap Jayanti is observed across India — most prominently in Rajasthan, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh, where it is a public holiday in some years — to commemorate the birth of Maharana Pratap Singh of Mewar (born May 9, 1540, at Kumbhalgarh Fort), the warrior-king who refused for 25 years to accept Mughal suzerainty under Akbar. The day is marked with parades, public lectures, processions in his hometown of Kumbhalgarh and his capital cities of Gogunda, Udaipur, and Chavand, and with floral tributes to his statues across northern India — most prominently the great equestrian statue of Pratap astride his beloved horse Chetak that stands atop Moti Magri ("Pearl Hill") in Udaipur, completed in 1948. Maharana Pratap is, with Chhatrapati Shivaji and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, one of the three principal warrior-icons of pre-modern Indian resistance to imperial domination, and is widely honoured in school textbooks, folk ballads, and political iconography across the Hindi belt. Note: traditional Hindu-calendar observance falls on the Tritiya tithi of the Shukla Paksha of Jyeshtha, which in the Gregorian calendar typically falls in late May or early June; the May 9 Gregorian date is the dominant civic commemoration date in modern Indian practice.

Liberation Day is a public holiday in the British Crown Dependencies of Jersey and Guernsey, marking the end of the German occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War on May 9, 1945 — the day after V-E Day in Western Europe. The Channel Islands had been occupied since June 30, 1940, and were the only British territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany during the entire war. After D-Day in June 1944 the islands were bypassed and effectively besieged by the Allies for eleven months, with the German garrison and the civilian population suffering severe food shortages by the end of the war. On May 9, 1945, Force 135 of the British Army, with units of the Royal Navy, accepted the German surrender aboard HMS Bulldog (the same destroyer that had captured U-110 four years earlier) off St Peter Port, Guernsey, and aboard HMS Beagle off St Helier, Jersey, before going ashore to liberate the islands. The famous V-for-Victory speech by King George VI was broadcast to the islanders that evening: "Our dear Channel Islands are also liberated today." Liberation Day is celebrated on Jersey and Guernsey with parades, vintage-vehicle processions, fireworks, and the Liberation Square ceremony at the granite obelisk in St Helier.

Romania observes May 9 as the anniversary of its declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire on May 9, 1877. On that day Romanian Foreign Minister Mihail Kogălniceanu rose in the Chamber of Deputies in Bucharest and declared, "We are independent; we are a sovereign nation," repudiating Romania's nominal Ottoman suzerainty. Romania (then a united principality of Wallachia and Moldavia under Prince Carol I, of the German house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen) entered the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 on the Russian side; Romanian arms were decisive at the Siege of Plevna, where Carol I personally commanded combined Russo-Romanian forces. Independence was internationally recognised by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, and Carol I was crowned the first King of Romania in 1881 with a crown forged from a captured Ottoman cannon. The fact that May 9 is also the anniversary of the 1945 Allied victory in Europe and of the 1950 Schuman Declaration — Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007 — gives the date a particularly layered triple-significance in Romanian civic memory.