Thousands of Jews deported from Chelm

Word reaches Fray Marcos that Native Americans have killed his guide Estevan, a Black enslaved man who was the first non-Indigenous man to visit the pueblo lands of the American Southwest.

On the banks of the Mississippi River in present-day Louisiana, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto dies, ending a three-year journey for gold that took him halfway across what is now the United States. In order that local peoples would not learn of his death, and thus disprove de Soto’s claims of divinity, his men buried his body in the Mississippi River.

The Ashmolean, the world’s first university museum, opens in Oxford, England.

On May 21, 1758, Mary Campbell, believed to be ten years old, is abducted from her home in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania by members of the Lenape tribe; she becomes an icon of the French and Indian War.

In Washington, D.C., humanitarians Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons found the American National Red Cross, an organization established to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters in congruence with the International Red Cross.

On May 21, 1901, Connecticut becomes the first state to pass a law regulating motor vehicles, limiting their speed to 12 mph in cities and 15 mph on country roads.

Six years after the First Moroccan Crisis, during which Kaiser Wilhelm’s sensational appearance in Morocco provoked international outrage and led to a strengthening of the bonds between Britain and France against Germany, French troops occupy the Moroccan city of Fez on May 21, 1911, sparking German wrath and a second Moroccan Crisis.

On May 21, 1924, 14-year-old Bobby Franks is abducted from a Chicago, Illinois, street and killed in what later proves to be one of the most unusual murders in American history. The killers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were wealthy and intelligent teenagers whose sole motive for killing Franks was the desire to commit the “perfect crime.”

American pilot Charles A. Lindbergh lands at Le Bourget Field in Paris, successfully completing the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight and the first ever nonstop flight between New York to Paris. His single-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, had lifted off from Roosevelt Field in New York 33 1/2 hours before.

Five years to the day that American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first pilot to accomplish a solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, female aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first pilot to repeat the feat, landing her plane in Ireland after flying across the North Atlantic. Earhart traveled over 2,000 miles from Newfoundland in just under 15 hours.

On May 21, 1940, a “special unit” carries out its mission and begins murdering more than 1,500 hospital patients in East Prussia. The massacre lasted until June 6, 1940.

On May 21, 1942, 4,300 Jews are deported from the Polish town of Chelm to the Nazi extermination camp at Sobibor, where all are later gassed to death. On the same day, the German firm IG Farben sets up a factory just outside Auschwitz, in order to take advantage of Jewish slave laborers from the Auschwitz concentration camps.

The United States conducts the first airborne test of an improved hydrogen bomb, dropping it from a plane over the tiny island of Namu in the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean on May 21, 1956. (Because of the time difference, it was still May 20 in the U.S.) The successful test indicated that hydrogen bombs were viable airborne weapons and that the arms race had taken another giant leap forward.

On May 21, 1960, the first tremor of a series hits Valdivia, Chile. By the time they end, the quakes and their aftereffects kill 5,000 people and leave another 2 million homeless. Registering a magnitude of 7.6, the first earthquake was powerful and killed several people. It turned out to be only a foreshock, however, to one of the most powerful tremors ever recorded.

Amy Fisher, the so-called “Long Island Lolita,” is arrested for shooting Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the front porch of her Massapequa, New York, home. Fisher, only 17 at the time of the shooting, was having an affair with 38-year-old Joey Buttafuoco, Mary Jo’s husband. The tawdry story soon became a tabloid and talk-show fixture, the source of three television movies and countless jokes.

A three-year-old boy dies of avian influenza in Hong Kong on May 21, 1997. By the time the outbreak was controlled, six people were dead and 1.6 million domestic fowl were destroyed.

“The streak is over…Susan Lucci!” announces Shemar Moore of The Young and the Restless on this night in 1999, right before presenting the Daytime Emmy Award for Best Actress to the tearful star of ABC’s All My Children. The award was Lucci’s first win in 19 straight years of being nominated in the Best Actress category for her portrayal of Erica Kane.

On May 21, 2000, the bones of President James Garfield’s spine are on display for a final day at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. The exhibit featured medical oddities from the museum’s archives.