On This Day: May 12 (original) (raw)
Updated May 12, 2014, 8:54 am
On May 12, 1943, during World War II, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered.
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On May 12, 1820, Florence Nightingale, the Englishwoman who established nursing as a trained profession for women, was born. Following her death on Aug. 13, 1910, her obituary appeared in The Times.
Go to obituary » | Other birthdays »
| 1820 | Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, was born in Florence, Italy. |
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| 1870 | Manitoba entered the confederation as a Canadian province. |
| 1907 | Actress Katharine Hepburn was born in Hartford, Conn. |
| 1932 | The body of the kidnapped son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was found in a wooded area of Hopewell, N.J. |
| 1943 | Axis forces in North Africa surrendered during World War II. |
| 1949 | The Soviet Union announced an end to the Berlin blockade. |
| 1965 | West Germany and Israel established diplomatic relations. |
| 1970 | The Senate voted unanimously to confirm Harry A. Blackmun as a Supreme Court justice. |
| 1972 | The album "Exile on Main St." by the Rolling Stones was released. |
| 1982 | Pope John Paul II was assaulted by a knife-wielding Spanish priest while visiting the shrine of Fatima in Portugal. (In 2008, the pope's longtime private secretary revealed that the pontiff had been lightly wounded.) |
| 2002 | Jimmy Carter became the first present or former U.S. president to visit Cuba since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. |
| 2003 | Suicide bombers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killed 26 people, including nine U.S. citizens. |
| 2003 | Fifty-nine Texas House Democrats fled to Oklahoma to prevent passage of a congressional redistricting bill. |
| 2008 | An earthquake in China's Sichuan province killed some 70,000 people. |
| 2009 | Five Miami men were convicted in a plot to blow up FBI buildings and Chicago's Sears Tower. |
| 2011 | A German court convicted retired U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk of being an accessory to the murder of tens of thousands of Jews as a Nazi death camp guard. (Demjanjuk, who maintained his innocence, died in 2012.) |
Historic Birthdays
Florence Nightingale 5/12/1820 - 8/13/1910 English nurse; reformed nursing profession and medical care for soldiers.Go to obituary »
| 75 | Edward Lear 5/12/1812 - 1/29/1888 English landscape painter and poet |
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| 53 | Dante Gabriel Rossetti 5/12/1828 - 4/9/1882 English painter and poet |
| 70 | Jules Massenet 5/12/1842 - 8/13/1912 French composer; best remembered for his operas |
| 79 | Gabriel Faure 5/12/1845 - 11/4/1924 French composer |
| 74 | Henry Cabot Lodge 5/12/1850 - 11/9/1924 American statesman; Massachusetts senator from 1893 to 1924 |
| 54 | Baron Clemens von Pirquet 5/12/1874 - 2/28/1929 Austrian physician; devised a skin test for tuberculosis |
| 71 | Lincoln Ellsworth 5/12/1880 - 5/26/1951 American explorer, engineer and scientist |
| 85 | Leslie Charteris 5/12/1907 - 4/15/1993 English novelist |
| 84 | Dorothy Hodgkin 5/12/1910 - 7/29/1994 English Nobel Prize-winning chemist (1964) |
| 35 | Julius Rosenberg 5/12/1918 - 6/19/1953 American engineer;executed with his wife for espionage in 1953 |