• 927 - Battle of the Bosnian Highlands Simeon I of Bulgaria decisively defeated by King Tomislav of Croatia
• 1120 - Richard III of Capua anointed as prince a fortnight before his untimely death.
• 1153 - Malcolm IV becomes King of Scotland.
• 1328 - Philip VI is crowned King of France.
• 1647 - Peter Stuyvesant was inaugurated as Director-General of New Netherland.
• 1703 - Tsar Peter the Great founds the city of Saint Petersburg.
• 1798 - The Battle of Oulart Hill occurs in Wexford, Ireland.
• 1812 - South American Wars of Independence: In Bolivia, the battle of La Coronilla, in which the women from Cochabamba fought against the Spanish army.
• 1813 - War of 1812: In Canada, American forces capture Fort George.
• 1849 - The Great Hall of Euston station, London opened.
• 1860 - Giuseppe Garibaldi begins his attack on Palermo, Sicily, as part of the Italian Unification.
• 1883 - Alexander III is crowned Tsar of Russia.
• 1895 - Oscar Wilde is sent to prison for sodomy.
• 1896 - The F4-strength St. Louis-East St. Louis Tornado hits in St. Louis, Missouri and East Saint Louis, Illinois, killing at least 255 people and incurring $2.9 billion in damages (1997USD).
• 1905 - Russo-Japanese War: The Battle of Tsushima begins.
• 1907 - A Bubonic plague outbreak begins in San Francisco, California.
• 1908 - Maulana Hakeem Noor-ud-Din elected first Khalifa of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community
• 1919 - The NC-4 aircraft arrives in Lisbon after completing the first transatlantic flight.
• 1927 - The Ford Motor Company ceases manufacturing the Ford Model T and begins to retool plants to make Ford Model A's.
• 1930 - The 1,046 feet (319 meters) tall Chrysler Building in New York (tallest man-made structure at the time) opens to the public.
• 1933 - New Deal: The U.S. Federal Securities Act is signed into law requiring the registration of securities with the Federal Trade Commission.
• 1933 - The Walt Disney Company releases the cartoon The Three Little Pigs, with its hit song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"
• 1933 - The Century of Progress World's Fair opens in Chicago.
• 1935 - New Deal: The Supreme Court of the United States declares the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional in the case A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, (295 U.S. 495).
• 1937 - In California, the Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County.
• 1939 - DC Comics publishes its second superhero in Detective Comics #27; he's Batman, one of the most topical comic book superheroes of all time.
• 1940 - World War II: 97 out of 99 members of a Royal Norfolk Regiment unit are massacred while trying to surrender at Dunkirk. The German commander, Captain Fritz Knoechlein, is eventually hanged for war crimes.
• 1941 - World War II: U.S. President Roosevelt proclaims an "unlimited national emergency".
• 1941 - World War II: The German battleship Bismarck is sunk in the North Atlantic killing almost 2,100 men.
• 1942 - World War II: Operation Anthropoid - assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague
• 1957 - Toronto's 1050 CHUM AM becomes Canada's first radio station to only broadcast top 40 Rock n' Roll music format.
• 1958 - The F-4 Phantom II flies for the first time.
• 1960 - In Turkey, a military coup removed President Celal Bayar and the rest of the democratic government from office.
• 1964 - Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru dies in office.
• 1965 - Vietnam War: United States warships begin bombardments of National Liberation Front targets within South Vietnam for the first time.
• 1967 - Australians vote in favour of a constitutional referendum granting the Australian government the power to make laws to benefit Indigenous Australians, and to count them in the national census.
• 1967 - The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) is christened by Jacqueline Kennedy and her daughter Caroline.
• 1968 - the meeting of the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (national Union of the students of France), most outstanding of the events of May 1968, proceeds and gathers 30.000 to 50.000 people in the Stade Sebastien Charlety.
• 1971 - The Dahlerau train disaster, the worst railway accident in West Germany, kills 46 people and injures 25 near Wuppertal.
• 1975 - Dibble's Bridge coach crash near Grassington, North Yorkshire, England killed 32 (highest ever death toll in a United Kingdom road accident).
• 1980 - The Gwangju Massacre: airborne and army troops of South Korea retake the city of Gwangju from civil militias, killing at least 207 and possibly many more.
• 1995 - In Culpeper, Virginia, actor Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down after falling from his horse in a riding competition.
• 1996 - First Chechnya War: Russian President Boris Yeltsin meets with Chechnyan rebels for the first time and negotiates a cease-fire in the war.
• 1997 - The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Paula Jones can pursue her sex harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton while he's in office.
• 1997 - A F5 tornado strikes Jarrell, Texas killing 27 people
• 1998 - Oklahoma City bombing: Michael Fortier is sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 for failing to warn authorities about the terrorist plot.
• 1999 - The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands indicts Slobodan Milošević and four others for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo.
• 2006 - The May 2006 Java earthquake strikes at 5:53:58 AM local time (22:53:58 UTC May 26) devastating Bantul and the city of Yogyakarta killing over 6,600 people.

Births