Today is Tuesday, May 19, the 139th day of 2026. There are 226 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On May 19, 1920, 10 people were killed in a gunbattle 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, West Virginia.
Also on this date:
In 1536, Anne Boleyn, the second wife of England’s King Henry VIII, was beheaded at the Tower of London after being convicted of adultery.
In 1883, William Cody held the first of his “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” shows in Omaha, Nebraska.
In 1921, President Warren G. Harding signed the Emergency Quota Act, which established national quotas for immigrants.
In 1943, British Prime Minister Winston 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 (expansion plans for the invasion caused the date of the landing to be delayed by a month).
In 1962, film star Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday to You” to President John F. Kennedy during a Democratic fundraiser at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
In 1974, Hungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik debuted the Rubik’s Cube, his multicolored invention that would make the leap from classroom teaching tool to a global phenomenon with over 450 million of the 3D puzzles sold.
In 1991, Croatians voted overwhelmingly for independence in a public referendum, triggering a formal breakup from Yugoslavia in June and a war leading to widespread ethnic cleansing and thousands of deaths.
In 2018, Britain’s Prince Harry wed American actor Meghan Markle in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.
In 2024, a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister and other officials crashed in Iran’s northwest mountains. Their bodies were recovered a day later after hours of searching in a fog-shrouded forest.
Today’s Birthdays: TV personality David Hartman is 91. Musician-composer Pete Townshend (The Who) is 81. Singer-actor Grace Jones is 78. Former racing driver Dario Franchitti is 53. Basketball Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett is 50. Country musician-producer Shooter Jennings is 47. Comedian-actor Michael Che is 43. Singer Sam Smith is 34. Country singer Lainey Wilson is 34. Celebrity chef Nick DiGiovanni is 30. Actor Carmen Sánchez is 25. Media personality-singer JoJo Siwa is 23. Actor Saylor Curda is 22.
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