Today is Wednesday, May 19, the 139th day of 2021. There are 226 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On May 19, 1967, the Soviet Union ratified a treaty with the United States and Britain, banning nuclear and other weapons from outer space as well as celestial bodies such as the moon. (The treaty entered into force in October 1967.)
On this date:
In 1536, Anne Boleyn, the second wife of England’s King Henry VIII, was beheaded after being convicted of adultery.
In 1913, California Gov. Hiram Johnson signed the Webb-Hartley Law prohibiting “aliens ineligible to citizenship” from owning farm land, a measure targeting Asian immigrants, particularly Japanese.
In 1920, 10 people were killed in a gun battle between coal miners, who were led by a local police chief, and a group of private security guards hired to evict them for joining a union in Matewan, a small “company town” in West Virginia.
In 1921, Congress passed, and President Warren G. Harding signed, the Emergency Quota Act, which established national quotas for immigrants.
In 1943, in his second wartime address to the U.S. Congress, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pledged his country’s full support in the fight against Japan; that evening, Churchill met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House, where the two leaders agreed on May 1, 1944 as the date for the D-Day invasion of France (the operation ended up being launched more than a month later).
In 1994, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in New York at age 64.
In 2019, “Game of Thrones” aired its 73rd and final episode on HBO, with a record-setting number of viewers.
Today’s Birthdays: TV personality David Hartman is 86. Rock singer-composer Pete Townshend (The Who) is 76. Rock singer-musician Dusty Hill (ZZ Top) is 72. College Football Hall of Famer and former NFL player Archie Manning is 72. Singer-actor Grace Jones is 70. Actor Steven Ford is 65. Former race car driver Dario Franchitti is 48. Country/rock singer Shooter Jennings is 42. Actor Drew Fuller is 41. Pop singer Sam Smith is 29.
