#TodayInHistory – May 2

May 2 – Some important events on this day

1335 👉🏼 Otto the Merry, Duke of Austria, becomes Duke of Carinthia 🇦🇹
1497 👉🏼 John Cabot’s expedition departs Bristol searching for new lands across the Atlantic 🗺

1536 👉🏼 Anne Boleyn is arrested and taken to the Tower of London.
Anne Boleyn was the second wife of Henry VIII, who famously had six in total, and was perhaps the most famous. In 1523 Anne was to marry Henry Percy, the son of the Earl of Northumberland, but this was broken off. She was, at this time, a maid to the court of Henry VIII’s wife Catherine of Aragon, and the king began courting her in early 1526.
Henry’s interest in his wife’s maid of honor was a turning point in English history. When the Catholic Church refused to accept his annulment to Catherine of Aragon, and his marriage to Anne on 25 January 1533, Henry broke off relations with the Pope and established an independent Church of England.
However, the happy marriage was not to last: Anne gave birth to a daughter, the future Elizabeth I, and Henry was disappointed when she had three miscarriages and no son. A mere three years later he was courting the love of Jane Seymour.
In May 1536 Anne was arrested and imprisoned on charges of high treason, and found guilty in a trial by jury that contained her former fiance and her own uncle. She was beheaded four days later at the Tower of London, and Henry VIII was betrothed to Jayne Seymour one day later.

1933 👉🏼 Loch Ness “Monster” sighted for the first time, igniting the modern legend.
The modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is born when a sighting spread around local news on this day. The newspaper Inverness Courier relates an account of a local couple who claim to have seen “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface.”
As a result, the story of the “monster” (a moniker chosen by the Courier editor) becomes a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound sterling reward for capture of the beast. After sighting was reported in the newspaper, interest steadily grew, especially after another couple claimed to have seen the animal on land.

1945 👉🏼 More than 1,000,000 German soldiers officially surrender to the Western Allies in Italy and Austria
1945 👉🏼 World War II: Battle of Berlin ends as Soviet army takes Berlin and General Weidling surrenders
1949 👉🏼 Arthur Miller wins Pulitzer Prize for “Death of a Salesman”
1982 👉🏼 Falklands War: Argentine cruiser General Belgrano sunk by British submarine Conqueror, killing more than 350 men
1998 👉🏼 Battle of Hogwarts: fictional battle that ended the Second Wizarding War with the death of Lord Voldemort at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry 🧙‍♂️
2008 👉🏼 Cyclone Nargis makes landfall in Myanmar killing over 130,000 people and leaving millions of people homeless 🌪
2011 👉🏼 Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI’s most wanted man is killed by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan 🇵🇰

2012 👉🏼 A pastel version of “The Scream”, by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch sells at auction for $119,922,500.
“The Scream” remains Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s most famous image and one of the most famous in modern art. The artist first painted it in 1893 but there are four versions, two in pastel and two in paint and a limited number of prints were also made.
Although a work in the Expressionistic style, the work depicts an actual landscape – Kristiania Fjord seen from Ekeberg near Oslo. The figure in the foreground though is ambiguous and the viewer is unable to tell if it is male, female, young or old. A year earlier Munch recorded his inspiration for the work, during a walk he wrote “I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature”.

2018 👉🏼 New research show plants “talk” to each other through their roots and the soil in study on corn published in journal “Plos One”
2019 👉🏼 2019 Second-only sketch known of Leonardo da Vinci from Queen Elizabeth’s collection revealed on the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death