1776 – Richard Henry Lee presents the "Lee Resolution" to the Continental Congress. The motion is seconded by John Adams and will lead to the United States Declaration of Independence.

1892 – Homer Plessy is arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the "whites-only" car of a train; he lost the resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson.

1899 – American Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.

1938 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Chinese Nationalist government creates the 1938 Yellow River flood to halt Japanese forces. Five hundred thousand to nine hundred thousand civilians are killed.

1965 – The Supreme Court of the United States hands down its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, prohibiting the states from criminalizing the use of contraception by married couples.

1975 – Sony launches Betamax, the first videocassette recorder format.

1933 – The first drive-in theater opens in Camden, New Jersey.

1934 – New Deal: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 into law, establishing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

1942 – World War II: The United States Navy's victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway is a major turning point in the Pacific Theater. All four Japanese fleet carriers taking part—Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū and Hiryū—are sunk, as is the heavy cruiser Mikuma. The American carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann are also sunk.

1944 – World War II: Commencement of Operation Overlord: The Allied invasion of Normandy begins with the execution of Operation Neptune—commonly referred to as D-Day—the largest seaborne invasion in history. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops cross the English Channel with about 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating. By the end of the day, the Allies have landed on five invasion beaches and are pushing inland.

1851 – Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, starts a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper.

1916 – Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court; he is the first American Jew to hold such a position.

1956 – Elvis Presley introduces his new single, "Hound Dog", on The Milton Berle Show, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements.

1968 – Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.

1981 – The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that five people in Los Angeles, California, have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS.

1989 – The Tank Man halts the progress of a column of advancing tanks for over half an hour after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

2004 – Noël Mamère, Mayor of Bègles, celebrates marriage for two men for the first time in France.

2012 – Last transit of Venus until the year 2117.

1783 – The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrate their montgolfière (hot air balloon).

1912 – Massachusetts becomes the first state of the United States to set a minimum wage.

1939 – The Holocaust: The MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 973 German Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps.

1977 – JVC introduces its VHS videotape at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. It will eventually prevail against Sony's rival Betamax system in a format war to become the predominant home video medium.

1989 – The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests are suppressed in Beijing by the People's Liberation Army, with between 241 and 10,000 dead (an unofficial estimate).

1844 – The last pair of great auks is killed.

1692 – Bridget Bishop is the first person to be tried for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts; she is found guilty the same day and hanged on June 10.

1966 – Surveyor program: Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on another world.

2003 – Europe launches its first voyage to another planet, Mars. The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe launches from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.

193 – The Roman Senate passes a motion proclaiming Septimius Severus emperor, awards divine honours to Pertinax, and sentences current emperor Didius Julianus to death.

Marcus Didius Julianus (29 January 133 – 2 June 193) was Roman emperor from March to June 193, during the Year of the Five Emperors. He is known for having purchased the title of emperor in an auction run by the Praetorian Guard.

1494 – A monk, John Cor, records the first known batch of Scotch whisky.

1868 – The Treaty of Bosque Redondo is signed, allowing the Navajo to return to their lands in Arizona and New Mexico.

1974 – The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims is published in the journal Emergency Medicine.

1988 – The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty comes into effect.

1990 – Cold War: George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev sign a treaty to end chemical weapon production.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

The Illustrated Story Behind the Tulsa Massacre (The Atlantic)

...from a recent Watchmen series (tv-show)

1909 – The National Negro Committee, forerunner to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), convenes for the first time.

1921 – The Tulsa race massacre kills at least 39, but other estimates of black fatalities vary from 55 to about 300.

1941 – Anglo-Iraqi War: The United Kingdom completes the re-occupation of Iraq and returns 'Abd al-Ilah to power as regent for Faisal II.

1947 – Ferenc Nagy, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Hungary, resigns from office after blackmail from the Hungarian Communist Party accusing him of being part of a plot against the state. This grants the Communists effective control of the Hungarian government.

1955 – The U.S. Supreme Court expands on its Brown v. Board of Education decision by ordering district courts and school districts to enforce educational desegregation "at all deliberate speed."

2005 – Vanity Fair reveals that Mark Felt was "Deep Throat".

2010 – Israeli Shayetet 13 commandos board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla while still in international waters trying to break the ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip; nine Turkish citizens on the flotilla were killed in the ensuing violent affray.

1806 – Future U.S. President Andrew Jackson kills Charles Dickinson in a duel.

1937 – Memorial Day massacre: Chicago police shoot and kill ten labor demonstrators.

1943 – The Holocaust: Josef Mengele becomes chief medical officer of the Zigeunerfamilienlager (Romani family camp) at Auschwitz concentration camp.

1975 – The European Space Agency is established.

1998 – Nuclear Testing: Pakistan conducts an underground test in the Kharan Desert. It is reported to be a plutonium device with yield of 20kt TNT equivalent.

2024 – Donald Trump is convicted of falsifying business records in his New York trial, the first time a former President of the United States has been found guilty in a criminal case.

"Ain't I a Woman?"

The leaders of the movement trembled on seeing a tall, gaunt black woman in a gray dress and white turban, surmounted with an uncouth sunbonnet, march deliberately into the church, walk with the air of a queen up the aisle, and take her seat upon the pulpit steps. A buzz of disapprobation was heard all over the house, and there fell on the listening ear, 'An abolition affair!" "Woman's rights and niggers!" "I told you so!" "Go it, darkey!" . .

(the speech went like)

"Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin' out o' kilter. I tink dat 'twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin' 'bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all dis here talkin' 'bout?..

... Den dey talks 'bout dis ting in de head; what dis dey call it?" ("Intellect," whispered some one near.) "Dat's it, honey. What's dat got to do wid womin's rights or nigger's rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yourn holds a quart, wouldn't ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?" And she pointed her significant finger, and sent a keen glance at the minister who had made the argument. The cheering was long and loud.

1851 – Sojourner Truth delivers her famous Ain't I a Woman? speech at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

1913 – Igor Stravinsky's ballet score The Rite of Spring receives its premiere performance in Paris, France, provoking a near-riot.

1919 – Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is tested (later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington and Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin.

585 BC – A solar eclipse occurs, as predicted by the Greek philosopher and scientist Thales, while Alyattes is battling Cyaxares in the Battle of the Eclipse, leading to a truce. This is one of the cardinal dates from which other dates can be calculated. It is also the earliest event of which the precise date is known.

1830 – U.S. President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act which denies Native Americans their land rights and forcibly relocates them.

1936 – Alan Turing submits On Computable Numbers for publication.

1964 – The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is founded, with Yasser Arafat elected as its first leader.

1998 – Nuclear testing: Pakistan responds to a series of nuclear tests by India with five of its own codenamed Chagai-I, prompting the United States, Japan, and other nations to impose economic sanctions. Pakistan celebrates Youm-e-Takbir annually.

1999 – In Milan, Italy, after 22 years of restoration work, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Last Supper is put back on display.

2016 – Harambe, a gorilla, is shot to death after grabbing a three-year-old boy in his enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, resulting in widespread criticism and sparking various internet memes.

1096 – The largest of the Rhineland massacres (depicted) took place in Mainz, where at least 1,100 Jews were killed by the People's Crusade.

1962 – The Centralia mine fire is ignited in the town's landfill above a coal mine.

2016 – Barack Obama is the first president of the United States to visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and meet Hibakusha.

2025 - 

1908 – The first major commercial oil strike in the Middle East is made at Masjed Soleyman in southwest Persia. The rights to the resource were quickly acquired by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

1938 – In the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee begins its first session.

1967 – The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is released.

240 BC – First recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.

1895 – Playwright, poet and novelist Oscar Wilde is convicted of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" and sentenced to serve two years in prison.

1925 – Scopes Trial: John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching human evolution in Tennessee.

1933 – The Walt Disney Company cartoon Three Little Pigs premieres at Radio City Music Hall, featuring the hit song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"

1953 – Nuclear weapons testing: At the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its first and only nuclear artillery test.

1961 – Apollo program: U.S. President John F. Kennedy announces, before a special joint session of the U.S. Congress, that the United States "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

1977 – Star Wars (retroactively titled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) is released in US theaters.

2009 – North Korea allegedly tests its second nuclear device, after which Pyongyang also conducts several missile tests, building tensions in the international community.

2018 – Ireland votes to repeal the Eighth Amendment of their constitution that prohibits abortion in all but a few cases, choosing to replace it with the Thirty-sixth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland.

1607 – Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North America, is founded.

1844 – Samuel Morse sends the message "What hath God wrought" (a biblical quotation, Numbers 23:23) from a committee room in the United States Capitol to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore, Maryland, to inaugurate a commercial telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C.

1856 – John Brown and his men kill five slavery supporters at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas.

1940 – Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.

1956 – The first Eurovision Song Contest is held in Lugano, Switzerland.

1958 – United Press International is formed through a merger of the United Press and the International News Service.

1961 – American civil rights movement: Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, for "disturbing the peace" after disembarking from their bus.

1967 – Belle de Jour, directed by Luis Buñuel, is released.

1976 – The Judgment of Paris takes place in France, launching California as a worldwide force in the production of quality wine.

1980 – The Shining, the psychological horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick, is premiered on 10 screens in New York City and Los Angeles on the Memorial Day weekend.

1995 – The first version of the Java programming language is released.