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American history, reported as it happened
Made for the 250thOn this day › May 10
What happened on May 10 in American history
May 10 is the 130th day of the year (the 131st in leap years). Patriot Compass has published 25 stories from May 10 spanning 1773 to 2024. Among them: in 1773, Parliament passes the Tea Act; Company tea will now be cheaper than smuggled Dutch; and in 1775, Twelve colonies convene in Philadelphia; no army, no treasury, a war already begun.
1773Member story · 1776 Club
Parliament passes the Tea Act; Company tea will now be cheaper than smuggled Dutch
Lord North's bill rescues the East India Company's eighteen million pounds of unsold stock, but colonists see the bargain price as bait to make them accept Parliament's right to tax.
1775
Twelve colonies convene in Philadelphia; no army, no treasury, a war already begun
Delegates gather at the Pennsylvania State House three weeks after Lexington and Concord, with no authority from the Crown and no clear path forward.
1775
Allen and Arnold take Ticonderoga; not a shot is fired
83 Green Mountain Boys cross Lake Champlain before dawn and walk out with a British fort's entire stockpile of heavy artillery.
1801Member story · 1776 Club
Tripoli cuts down the American flagstaff; the Pasha declares war without a word on paper
Yusuf Karamanli sends men to the consulate in the customary Barbary fashion, and Jefferson, who has argued against tribute for fifteen years, now has his war.
1837Member story · 1776 Club
New York banks refuse gold; every institution in the city suspends specie payments
Commercial paper is now worthless at face value across Manhattan, and no floor is yet in sight for a crisis spreading from Mississippi cotton fields to counting houses.
1849Member story · 1776 Club
Soldiers fire into the crowd outside the Astor Opera House; at least 22 are dead
Ten thousand filled the streets to stop Macready from finishing Macbeth. He finished. The militia did not wait long before shooting.
1865Member story · 1776 Club
Quantrill is shot in the back and paralyzed; Union hunters corner him in a Kentucky barn
Terrell's guerrilla hunters trap the raider who burned a quarter of Lawrence and killed some 150 men and boys, and he is now paralyzed from the chest down.
1869Member story · 1776 Club
Stanford swings and misses; the telegraph operator sends "DONE" anyway
At 12:47 p.m. at Promontory Summit, a polite fiction closes 1,911 miles of track and brings cities from coast to coast to a standstill.
1872Member story · 1776 Club
Equal Rights Party nominates Woodhull for president; no woman has stood here before
The Wall Street broker and newspaper publisher accepts the nomination at Apollo Hall in New York City, the daughter of an Ohio con man now a candidate for the nation's highest office.
1876Member story · 1776 Club
Grant and Pedro II throw the switch; a 650-ton steam engine roars to life in Philadelphia
The Centennial Exposition opens in Fairmount Park with Bell's telephone, a torch-bearing arm of an unfinished Statue of Liberty, and a 57-ton Krupp cannon on the grounds.
1908Member story · 1776 Club
Anna Jarvis fills her mother's church in Grafton; the first Mother's Day service begins
Three years after Ann Reeves Jarvis's death, her daughter leads worship at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church before the same congregation her mother once served.
1924Member story · 1776 Club
Coolidge names Hoover, 29, to lead the Bureau of Investigation; Burns leaves under Teapot Dome's shadow
The new director inherits a bureau of 650 employees and 441 special agents, brought in to clear the air after his predecessor's scandal entanglement.
1940Member story · 1776 Club
Chamberlain quits; Churchill is summoned to the Palace as Germany crosses three borders
Labour refused to serve under Chamberlain, Halifax ruled himself out, and the King sent for the man who spent the decade calling appeasement a catastrophe in the making.
1940Member story · 1776 Club
German gliders land on a fortress roof before dawn; Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands are invaded
Hollow charges crack the gun turrets at Fort Eben-Emael by 4 a.m., as Wehrmacht ground forces cross three frontiers simultaneously under Case Yellow.
1946
A V-2 rises over White Sands; America fires a German rocket on its own soil for the first time
The missile that killed an estimated 9,000 civilians in London and Antwerp flies without a warhead, guided by manuals translated from German, as its builders work nearby under Operation Paperclip.
1962Member story · 1776 Club
Lee and Kirby put a gamma-ray monster on newsstands; a soldier just calls him "a hulk"
Dr. Bruce Banner shields a teenager from an experimental bomb blast and transforms at nightfall into a gray-skinned creature built from Frankenstein, Jekyll, and a mother lifting a car.
1967Member story · 1776 Club
Peterson walks away after M2-F2 rolls six times on the lake bed; the lifting body is a wreck
A rescue helicopter drew his eye at the wrong moment, a crosswind caught the craft, and the gear was still unlocked when the Northrop ship hit the ground at Edwards.
1969Member story · 1776 Club
Honeycutt's battalion moves into the jungle toward Hill 937; the enemy is waiting
The PAVN 29th Regiment, veterans of Hue, has dug concentric bunker lines into Dong Ap Bia and shows no sign of retreating.
1975Member story · 1776 Club
Sony puts Betamax on American shelves; the battle for the living room is on
The LV-1901, bundled with a 19-inch Trinitron television, hits stores as Sony bets its superior picture quality will settle the question of which format survives.
1994Member story · 1776 Club
Gacy dies at 12:58 a.m.; the IV line clogged first, and the crowd outside waited in the dark
The lethal injection tube solidified mid-procedure at Stateville. His last words, directed at a prison official: "Kiss my ass." He was convicted of thirty-three murders.
1994Member story · 1776 Club
Mandela takes the oath at Pretoria; three and a half centuries of white minority rule end
The man born Rolihlahla, a Xhosa word meaning "troublemaker," is sworn in before four thousand guests and an estimated billion television viewers worldwide.
2002Member story · 1776 Club
Judge Hilton sentences Hanssen to 15 consecutive life terms; the FBI agent will never leave prison
Over 22 years, Hanssen sold six thousand classified documents, nuclear war strategies, and the names of double agents to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash, diamonds, and Rolex watches.
2005Member story · 1776 Club
A grenade lands 18 metres from Bush's podium in Tbilisi; it does not go off
A red tartan handkerchief stayed wound around the striker lever; Bush and Saakashvili are told of the attempt only after the rally ends.
2017Member story · 1776 Club
SDF commander Felat declares Tabqa Dam captured; the last 14 fighters surrendered this afternoon
Sealed in the control room without light, air, or radio contact for 49 days, the Chechen and French African holdouts give up at 4 p.m., handing the SDF Syria's largest dam and a city of 80,000.
2024Member story · 1776 Club
Solar storm slams Earth at 950 km/s; auroras blaze as far south as the Florida Keys
AR3664's G5-class geomagnetic eruption, the most intense in 21 years, compresses the magnetopause nearly in half and triggers the largest coordinated satellite maneuver on record.
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