May 22

337 – Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus, otherwise known as Constantine the Great, the first ‘official’  Christian Emperor of Rome, dies at age 65 in Nicomedia, Bithynia province.

1176 – Hashshashins fail in their attempt to assassinate  Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, more well known in the west as Saladin, near Aleppo, Syria.

1520 – Conquistador and Deputy governor Pedro de Alvarado, on learning that the festival of Tóxcatl that Emperor Montezuma had requested, included a human sacrifice, has his troops interrupt the ceremony and in the process kill almost all the Aztecs in the temple of Tezcatlipoca.

1804 – With the arrival of William Clark and men from Camp Dubois, the Lewis and Clark Expedition departs from St. Charles, Missouri.

1807 – A grand jury indicts former Vice President Aaron Burr on a charge of treason for allegedly attempting to help Mexico overthrow Spanish control there.

1819 – SS Savannah, a hybrid sail/sidewheel steamship, leaves port at Savannah, Georgia on a voyage to become the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

1846 – The Associated Press is formed in New York City as a non-profit news cooperative.

1849 – Abraham Lincoln is issued a patent for an invention to lift boats, the only U.S. president to ever hold a patent.

1856 – Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina severely beats Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane in the hall of the  Senate for a speech Sumner had made regarding Southerners and slavery.

1858 –  The Confederación Granadina (now the separate nations of Panama, Colombia & parts of Brazil) is formed by the congress of the Republic of New Granada at Bogotá passing a change in the constitution

1866 – Buying and reorganizing the New Haven Arms Company, Oliver Winchester founds the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

1872 – President Ulysses S. Grant signs the Amnesty Act into law, restoring full civil and political rights to all but a few Confederate sympathizers.

1900 – The Associated Press is formed in New York City as a non-profit news cooperative.

1906 – The Wright brothers are granted U.S. patent number 821,393 for their “Flying-Machine”.

1915 – Mount Lassen in northern California erupts, the only volcano besides Mount St. Helens to erupt in the contiguous U.S. during the 20th century.

1948 – Thomas C. Wasson, the US Consul General to Israel, is shot in Jerusalem by an unknown assassin, dying the next day.

1962 – Continental Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 707, crashes in Unionville, Missouri after what is determined to be a suicide detonating a dynamite bomb on board for an insurance payout, killing 44 of 45 crew and passengers on board with 1 passenger dying later at a hospital.

1964 – Lyndon B. Johnson launches the Great Society program.

1968 – The Skipjack class nuclear powered submarine USS Scorpion sinks  400 miles southwest of the Azores with the loss of all 99 men aboard.

1969 – Commander Thomas P. Stafford and Lunar Module Pilot John W. Young, flying the Apollo 10 Lunar Module Snoopy, separate from the Command Module Charlie Brown and descend to within 8.4 nautical miles of the moon’s surface before returning to rendezvous with the Command Module.

1998 – U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson rules that U.S. Secret Service agents can be compelled to testify before a grand jury concerning the Lewinsky scandal involving President Bill Clinton.

2002 – A jury in Birmingham, Alabama convicts former Ku Klux Klan member Bobby Frank Cherry of the 1963 murder of four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

2011 – An EF5 force tornado strikes Joplin, Missouri, killing 158 people and causing $2.8 billion in damage, the costliest single tornado in U.S. history.

2017 – President Donald Trump visits the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and becomes the 1st sitting U.S. president to visit the Western Wall of the temple Mount.