History of the Day for:
May 4
- 1626: Gov. Peter Minuit bought a 20,000-acre island for $24 in cloth and brass buttons. It later became Manhattan.
- 1776: Rhode Island became the first colony to declare its independence from England, two months before the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
- 1852: The inspiration for the character in "Alice in Wonderland," Alice Liddell, was born.
- 1886: The gramophone was patented.
- 1919: Students demonstrated in China against the Versailles Peace Conference decision to hand Germany's possessions in Shantung Province to Japan. Known as the May Fourth Movement, it led to the birth of the Chinese Communist Party.
- 1927: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded.
- 1929: Actress/human rights spokesperson Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels, Belgium.
- 1932: Al Capone, the Mafia boss who became America's Public Enemy No. 1, began his prison sentence for tax evasion.
- 1942: The battle of the Coral Sea started in World War II, when naval and air battles began off the Solomon Islands.
- 1961: The "Freedom Riders" left Washington for New Orleans to challenge racial segregation in interstate buses and bus terminals.
- 1964: The Pulitzer Prize jury failed, for the first time, to award winners in the areas of fiction, drama and music; the soap opera "Another World" premiered on NBC.
- 1970: Ohio National Guard troops shot and killed four students and wounded 11 at Kent State University after demonstrations against the Vietnam war.
- 1989: Col. Oliver North was found guilty in the investigations into the Iran-Contra affair.
- 1994: Israel and the PLO signed a historic agreement giving Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip their first measure of freedom since the 1967 Middle East war.
- 1997: IBM's Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, evening their six-game series at one game apiece.
- 1998: A federal judge in Sacramento, California, gives "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski four life sentences plus 30 years after Kaczynski accepts a plea agreement sparing him from the death penalty.
- 2000: Ken Livingstone becomes the first Mayor of London.
- 2001: The Milwaukee Art Museum addition, the first Santiago Calatrava-designed structure in the United States, opens to the public.
- 2002: An EAS Airlines BAC 1-11-500 crashes in a suburb of Kano, Nigeria shortly after takeoff killing more than 148 people.
- 2007: Greensburg, Kansas is almost completely destroyed by a 1.7mi wide EF-5 tornado.
- 2007: The Scottish National Party wins the Scottish general election and becomes the largest party in the Scottish Parliament for the first time ever.