Today is May 9. On this date in:
1712
The Carolina Colony was officially divided into two entities: North Carolina and South Carolina.
1914
President Woodrow Wilson, acting on a joint congressional resolution, signed a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.
1945
With World War II in Europe at an end, Soviet forces liberated Czechoslovakia from Nazi occupation.
1958
“Vertigo,” Alfred Hitchcock’s eerie thriller starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, premiered in San Francisco, the movie’s setting.
1961
In a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton N. Minow decried the majority of television programming as a “vast wasteland.”
1962
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology succeeded in reflecting a laser beam off the surface of the moon.
1970
President Richard Nixon made a surprise predawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial, where he chatted with a group of protesters who’d been resting on the Memorial steps after protests against the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings.
1980
35 people were killed when a freighter rammed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida, causing a 1,400-foot section of the southbound span to collapse.
1994
South Africa’s newly elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first black president.
2012
President Barack Obama declared his unequivocal support for same-sex marriage in a historic announcement that came three days after Vice President Joe Biden spoke in favor of such unions on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
2017
President Donald Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, ousting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the midst of an FBI investigation into whether Trump’s campaign had ties to Russia’s meddling in the election that sent him to the White House.
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