May 18: Facts & Historical Events On This Day

JJ from Austria claimed victory at the 69th Eurovision Song Contest with his debut single “Wasted Love.”

Chris Cornell, American musician of Soundgarden and Audioslave, committed suicide at age 52 by hanging.

Northern Somalia declared its independence, becoming the unrecognized de facto Republic of Somaliland.

India had their first successful nuclear bomb test.

The assigned code name of the mission was "Smiling Buddha." The bomb was detonated on the army base Pokhran Test Range under the supervision of several key Indian generals.

Apollo 10 was launched from the John F. Kennedy Space Center on a mission to the Moon.

The Apollo 10's orbiter was nicknamed Charlie Brown, and the lander was nicknamed Snoopy, after the characters from Charles Schulz's Peanuts.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Tennessee Valley Act to build dams.

This was signed to provide economic development to the Tennessee Valley, an area affected by the Great Depression.

The Chinese Theater opened in Hollywood, California, built in an Exotic Revival style architecture.

The US Congress passed Selective Service Act.

This act mandated a military draft for all males aged 18 to 30 to register to potentially be chosen for military service. Approximately 2.8 million ended up being drafted into World War I.

The Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln for president at the 1860 Republican National Convention.

John Bellingham was sentenced to death for assassinating Spencer Perceval, the British Prime Minister.

Napoleon Bonaparte was declared the Emperor of France by the French Senate.

Britain declared war on France after Napoleon Bonaparte continued interfering in Italy and Switzerland.

Playwright Thomas Kyd’s accusations of treason led to an arrest warrant for Christopher Marlowe, who was his roommate.

The Crusaders lost control of the city of Acre, the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s last bastion, after a fourteen-day siege.

Acre's capture by the Mamluks essentially ended a more than two-hundred-year occupation of Crusader forces in the Levant. There were regular attempts to start new crusades into the region, but nothing ever came of it.

The Worms massacre began.

This massacre was the murder of approximately 800 Jew from Worms, Germany. Crusaders made the killings after a rumor that the Jews had boiled a Christian alive and used his corpse to contaminate water to poison the town's wells.