May 4 in Pop Culture History

May 4 is Star Wars Day. “May the Fourth be with you.”

1626 – Dutch explorer Peter Minuit (~1594-1638), director-general of New Netherlands, bought Manhattan Island for 60 guilders (about $24 in 1839 dollars) worth of cloth and buttons.

1886 – A labor protest in Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, resulted in 100 wounded and eight police officers killed.

1904 – The United States began construction of the Panama Canal.

1933 – The discovery of radio waves from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy was announced by Karl Jansky.

1948 – Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published.

1953 – Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.

1970 – Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Allison B. Krause, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer were killed by National Guard troops at Ohio’s Kent State campus.

1972 – The Don’t Make A Wave Committee, an environmental organization founded in Canada in 1971, officially changed its name to the Greenpeace Foundation.

1974 # 1 Hit May 4, 1974 – May 17, 1974: Grand Funk – The Loco-Motion

1989 – The space probe Magellan was carried in the cargo bay Space Shuttle Atlantis and released to travel around the planet Venus.

1990 – Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida after his electric chair malfunctioned three times, causing his hair & head to catch fire.

1996 # 1 Hit May 4, 1996 – May 17, 1996: Mariah Carey – Always Be My Baby