May 4th

Paris Hilton was sentenced to jail for violating probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case. (The hotel heiress served 23 days behind bars.).

A federal judge sentenced Zacarias Moussaoui to life in prison for his role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Londoners elected their mayor for the first time.

Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski was given four life sentences plus 30 years by a federal judge in Sacramento, Calif., under a plea agreement that spared him the death penalty.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed an accord on Palestinian autonomy that granted self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito died at age 87.

Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to be elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Four Kent State University students were shot down by National Guard members during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.

A group of Freedom Riders left Washington, D.C., for New Orleans to challenge racial segregation on interstate buses and in bus terminals.

First Grammy Awards: Perry Como & Ella Fitzgerald win.

Ernest Hemingway wins the Pulitzer Prize. The American author was awarded the prestigious accolade for his novel The Old Man and the Sea. The story about a fisherman and his battle with a large marlin also earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Public Enemy Number One, Al Capone, was jailed for tax evasion.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded.

The United States takes over the construction of the Panama Canal. French engineers had begun digging a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in 1881, but they had to abandon the project after about 22,000 lives had been lost to accidents and disease.

A labor demonstration for an eight-hour workday at Haymarket Square in Chicago turned into a riot when a bomb exploded.

King Ferdinand VII of Spain signs the Decree of the 4th of May, returning Spain to absolutism.

King Charles II of England commissions the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The observatory was built on the prime meridian. The mean solar time at this location is the basis for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

Peter Minuit landed in Manhattan, which he later bought for $24 worth of cloth and brass buttons.

Wars of the Roses: Battle of Tewkesbury - final battle between Lancaster and York sees the Prince of Wales, Edward of Westminster killed and King Edward IV restored to his crown thus extinguishing the Lancastrian of Plantagenet line.