HISTORY OF MAY 29

1453 - Constantinople fell to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, ending the Byzantine Empire. 

1660 - Charles II was restored to the English throne after the Puritan Commonwealth. 

1721 - South Carolina was formally incorporated as a royal colony. 

1765 - Patrick Henry denounced the Stamp Act before Virginia's House of Burgesses. 

1790 - Rhode Island became the last of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the U.S.Constitution. 

1827 - The first nautical school opened in Nantucket, MA, under the name Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin’s Lancasterian School. 

1848 - WIsconsin became the 30th state to join the United States. 

1849 - A patent for lifting vessels
was granted to Abraham Lincoln. 

1910 - An airplane raced a train from Albany, NY, to New York City. The airplane pilot Glenn Curtiss won the $10,000 prize. 

1912 - Fifteen women were dismissed from their jobs at the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, PA, for dancing the Turkey Trot while on the job. 

1916 - The official flag of the president of the United States was adopted. 

1916 - U.S. forces invaded Dominican Republic and remained until 1924. 

1922 - Ecuador became independent. 

1922 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that organized baseball was a sport, not subject to antitrust laws. 

1932 - World War I veterans began arriving in Washington, DC. to demand cash bonuses they were not scheduled to receive for another 13 years. 

1951 - C.F. Blair became the first man to fly over the North Pole in single engine plane. 

1953 - Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became first men to reach the top of Mount Everest. 

1962 - Buck (John) O’Neil became the first black coach in major league baseball when he accepted the job with the Chicago Cubs. 

1965 - Ralph Boston set a world record in the broad jump at 27-feet, 4-3/4 inches, at a meet held in Modesto, CA. 

1973 - Tom Bradley was elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles. 

1974 - U.S. President Nixon agreed to turn over 1,200 pages of edited Watergate transcripts. 

1978 - In the U.S., postage stamps were raised from 13 cents to 15 cents. 

1981 - The U.S. performed a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site. 

1985 - Thirty-nine people were killed and 400 were injured in a riot at a European Cup soccer match in Brussels, Belgium. 

1986 - Colonel Oliver North told National Security Advisor William McFarlane that profits from weapons sold to Iran were being diverted to the Contras. 

1988 - U.S. President Reagan began his first visit to the Soviet Union in Moscow. 

1988 - NBC aired "To Heal A Nation," the story of Jan Scruggs' effort to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. 

1990 - Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic by the Russian parliament. 

1997 - The ruling party in Indonesia, Golkar, won the Parliament election by a record margin. There was a boycott movement and rioting that killed 200 people. 

1999 - Space shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station. 

2000 - Fiji's military took control of the nation and declared martial law following a coup attempt by indigenous Fijians in mid-May. 

2001 - In New York, four followers of Osama bin Laden were convicted of a global conspiracy to murder Americans. The crimes included the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people. 

2001 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disabled golfer Casey Martin could use a cart to ride in tournaments.