Today in History

1453		Constantinople falls to Muhammad II, ending the Byzantine Empire.
1660		Charles II is restored to the English throne, succeeding the short-lived Commonwealth.
1721		South Carolina is formally incorporated as a royal colony of England.
1790		Rhode Island becomes the last of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the Constitution.
1848		Wisconsin becomes the thirtieth state.
1849		A patent for lifting vessels is granted to Abraham Lincoln.
1862		Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard retreats to Tupelo, Mississippi.
1911		The Indianapolis 500 is run for the first time.
1913		The premier of the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) in Paris causes rioting in the theater.
1916		U.S. forces invade the Dominican Republic.
1922		Ecuador becomes independent.
1922		The U.S. Supreme Court rules organized baseball is a sport not subject to antitrust laws.
1942		The German Army completes its encirclement of the Kharkov region of the Soviet Union.
1951		C. F. Blair becomes the first man to fly over the North Pole in single-engine plane.
1953		Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first men to reach the top of Mount Everest.
1974		Nixon agrees to turn over 1,200 pages of edited Watergate transcripts.
1990		Boris Yeltsin is elected the president of Russia.