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 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 first running of the Indianapolis 500.  
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   President Richard Nixon agrees to turn over 1,200 pages of edited Watergate transcripts.  
1990   Boris Yeltsin is elected the president of Russia.