History of the Day for:
May 16
- 1770: 14-year-old Marie Antoinette married 15-year-old future King Louis XVI of France.
- 1817: Mississippi River steamboat service began.
- 1862: Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir built the first automobile.
- 1866: Charles Elmer Hires invented root beer.
- 1866: Congress authorized the 5-cent piece called a nickel.
- 1868: By one vote, the Senate failed to impeach President Andrew Johnson.
- 1869: Baseball's first all-pro team, the Cincinnati Reds, played their first baseball game.
- 1891: Geo. A. Hormel & Co. introduced Spam.
- 1929: The first Academy Awards were given.
- 1920: Joan of Arc was canonized in Rome.
- 1927: The Supreme Court ruled bootleggers must pay income tax.
- 1938: The first animal breeding society was organized in New Jersey.
- 1939: Food stamps were first issued.
- 1941: The Germans made their last major air attack on Britain.
- 1943: Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto ended after 30 days of fighting.
- 1960: A Big Four summit in Paris collapsed when the Soviet Union charged the U.S. with spying.
- 1963: Astronaut Gordon Cooper completed 22 orbits in Faith 7, ending Project Mercury.
- 1965: Spaghetti-O's were first sold.
- 1969: The U.S. nuclear submarine "Guitarro" sank in San Francisco; Venera 5 landed on Venus and returned information on its atmosphere.
- 1975: Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
- 1983: Lebanon's Parliament and the Israeli Knesset approved a U.S.-sponsored accord for the withdrawal of foreign troops, including Israeli soldiers, from Lebanon.
- 1985: Michael Jordan was named Rookie of the Year in the National Basketball Association.
- 1987: The "Bobro 400," a barge carrying 3,200 tons of garbage, set sail from New York, beginning an 8-week search for a dumping site. The search was unsuccessful.
- 1988: Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report saying nicotine was addictive in ways similar to heroin and cocaine.
- 1989: Soviet president Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping ended a 30-year rift when they formally met in Beijing.
- 1991: Queen Elizabeth II addressed the U.S. Congress, the first British monarch to do so.
- 1992: The space shuttle "Endeavour" completed its maiden voyage.
- 1995: Japanese police arrested cult leader Shoko Asahara and charged him with the nerve-gas attack on Tokyo's subways two months earlier.
- 2003: In Casablanca, Morocco, 33 civilians are killed and more than 100 people are injured in the Casablanca terrorist attacks.
- 2004: The Day of Mourning at Bykivnia forest, just outside of Kiev, Ukraine. Here during 1930s and early 1940s communist bolsheviks executed over 100,000 Ukrainian civilians.
- 2005: Kuwait permits women's suffrage in a 35-23 National Assembly vote.
- 2006: A large earthquake (7.4 on the Richter scale) occurs near New Zealand.