---

Our on this day in history archives contain over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few more of them:

May 5 is the 125th day of the year (126th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 240 days remain until the end of the year.

EVENTS

1215 – Rebel barons renounce their allegiance to King John of England — part of a chain of events leading to the signing of the Magna Carta.

1260 – Kublai Khan becomes ruler of the Mongol Empire.

1494 – On his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus sights Jamaica, landing at Discovery Bay and declares Jamaica the property of the Spanish crown.

1809 – Mary Kies becomes the first woman awarded a U.S. patent, for a technique of weaving straw with silk and thread.

1821 – Emperor Napoleon dies in exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.

1865 – American Civil War: The Confederate government was declared dissolved at Washington, Georgia.

1866 – Memorial Day first celebrated in United States at Waterloo, New York.

1877 – American Indian Wars: Sitting Bull leads his band of Lakota into Canada to avoid harassment by the United States Army under Colonel Nelson Miles.

1886 – Workers marching for the Eight-hour day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin were shot at by Wisconsin National Guardsmen in what became known as the Bay View Massacre.

1891 – The Music Hall in New York City (later known as Carnegie Hall) has its grand opening and first public performance, with Tchaikovsky as the guest conductor.

1904 – Pitching against the Philadelphia Athletics at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, Cy Young of the Boston Americans throws the first perfect game in the modern era of baseball.

1961 – Project Mercury: Alan Shepard becomes the first American to travel into outer space, on a sub-orbital flight.

1985 – Ronald Reagan visits the military cemetery at Bitburg and the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he makes a speech.

2023 – The World Health Organization declares the end of the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency.

---

---