May 21: What Happened on This Day in History (Elementary Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1502 - The island of Saint Helena is discovered by the Portuguese explorer João da Nova.
2. 1881 - The American Red Cross is established by Clara Barton inWashington, D.C..
3. 1932 - Bad weather forces Amelia Earhart to land in a pasture in Derry, Northern Ireland, and she thereby becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
4. 1937 - A Soviet station, North Pole-1, becomes the first scientific research settlement to operate on the drift ice of the Arctic Ocean.
5. 1972 - Michelangelo's Pietà in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is damaged by avandal, the mentally disturbed Hungarian geologist Laszlo Toth.
6. Famous Birthdays: Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis (French mathematician and engineer), Mary Anning (English paleontologist), Charles Albert Gobat (Swiss lawyer and politician, Nobel Prize laureate), Willem Einthoven (Indonesian-Dutch physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate ), Günter Blobel (Polish-American biologist, Nobel Prize laureate)

For famous birthdays and other daily events in history, visit our Daily Dose Activities.

Click Here for Yesterday in History: May 20

Click Here for Tomorrow in History: May 22

For more history resources on Internet 4 Classrooms, visit our Social Studies and History index. For Pre K-8th Grade Level History and Social Studies Resources, visit our Grade Level Index.