May 1 birthdays & history

Famous people born on May 1

• 1769Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Irish-English field marshal and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• 1852Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Spanish neuroscientist and pathologist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1988Anushka Sharma, Indian actress and film producer
• 1881Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French priest, palaeontologist, and philosopher
• 1987Leonardo Bonucci, Italian footballer
• 1923Joseph Heller, American novelist, short story writer, and playwright
• 1969Wes Anderson, American director, producer, and screenwriter
• 1982Darijo Srna, Croatian footballer
• 1916Glenn Ford, Canadian-American actor and producer
• 2004Charli D'Amelio, American social media influencer and dancer

What happened on May 1

• 305Diocletian and Maximian retired as co-rulers of the Roman Empire, being succeeded by Galerius and Constantius Chlorus.
• 880The Nea Ekklesia church in Constantinople, on which many later cross-in-square Eastern Orthodox churches were based, was consecrated.
• 1576Stephen Báthory and Anna Jagiellon were crowned as the elected rulers of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
• 1707Under the terms of the Acts of Union, the Kingdoms of England and Scotland merged to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, with a single parliament and government based in Westminster.
• 1786The Marriage of Figaro (audio featured), an opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
• 1884Moses Fleetwood Walker, the last African American in Major League Baseball until Jackie Robinson, played his first game for the Toledo Blue Stockings.
• 1885The original Chicago Board of Trade Building opened for business.
• 1897The Ramakrishna Mission was founded by Swami Vivekananda to serve as the humanitarian counterpart to the Hindu monastic order Ramakrishna Math.
• 1931New York City's Empire State Building, at the time the tallest building in the world, opened.
• 1941Citizen Kane, a widely acclaimed film by actor and director Orson Welles, premiered.
• 1950Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
• 2002The Horncastle boar's head, which probably once formed part of the crest of an Anglo-Saxon helmet, was found.

Also observed on May 1

• Armed Forces Day (Mauritania)
• Constitution Day (Argentina, Latvia, Marshall Islands)
• Lei Day (Hawaii)
• May Day (beginning of Summer) observances in the Northern hemisphere (see April 30): Calan Mai (Wales)
• May Day (beginning of Summer) observances in the Northern hemisphere (see April 30): Beltane (Gaelic)