Today in history:
On May 16, 1966, Chinese Communist Party issued the May 16 Notification, a document which criticized “counterrevolutionary revisionists” within the party and marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
Also on this date:
In 1770, Marie Antoinette, age 14, married the future King Louis XVI of France, who was 15.
In 1868, having already been impeached by the House of Representatives, President Andrew Johnson narrowly avoided impeachment by the Senate, which voted 35-19 in favor of impeachment—one vote shy of the required two-thirds majority.
In 1929, the first Academy Awards were presented. “Wings” won the award for Outstanding Picture, while Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor were named Best Actor and Best Actress.
In 1943, the nearly month-long Warsaw Ghetto Uprising came to an end as German forces crushed the Jewish resistance and blew up the city’s Great Synagogue.
In 1960, the first working laser was demonstrated at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, by physicist Theodore Maiman.
In 1975, Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton publicly apologized for the notorious 40-year Tuskegee Experiment, in which government scientists deliberately allowed Black men to weaken and die of treatable syphilis.
In 2018, officials at Michigan State University said they had agreed to pay $500 million to settle claims from more than 300 women and girls who said they were assaulted by sports doctor Larry Nassar.
In 2022, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 reached 1 million.
