On May 3
On May 3, the Human Saga records one pivotal event: Kingdom of Kongo converts to Christianity under Nzinga a Nkuwu (João I) (1491).
On this day
On 3 May 1491, the ManiKongo (king) Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised as João I at Mbanza Kongo, marking the first conversion of a sub-Saharan African monarch to Roman Catholicism.
Also this week in history (Apr 30 – May 6)
On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, ending the Vietnam War.
On 30 April 1993 the European physics laboratory CERN, at the urging of the Web's inventor Tim Berners-Lee, signed a declaration placing the World Wide Web's underlying software and protocols into the public domain, making the technology…
On 6 May 1682 King Louis XIV formally established the seat of the French monarchy at the Palace of Versailles, transforming his father's hunting lodge into the most magnificent royal residence in Europe and the operational centre of the…
On 4 May 1799 a British East India Company army and its allies stormed the island fortress of Seringapatam (Srirangapatna), capital of the Kingdom of Mysore, ending the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore War.
By a treaty signed in Paris and dated 30 April 1803, the United States bought the vast Louisiana Territory from Napoleonic France for roughly $15 million, acquiring some 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River.
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened in Hyde Park, London, on 1 May 1851 and ran until 15 October, the first in the great series of international world's fairs.
On 4 May 1919, around three thousand students gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest the decision at the Paris Peace Conference to transfer Germany's former concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than return them to China.
In late 2009 Greece revealed that its budget deficits were far larger than previously reported, and by April 2010 credit-rating agencies had downgraded Greek bonds to junk status, freezing the country out of private capital markets and…
On 2 May 2011 (1 May in the US), US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda and architect of the September 11 attacks, during a covert night raid on his fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.