Historical Events On May 31

Today is Saturday, May 31, the 151st day of 2014. There are 214 days left in the year. On May 31, 1889, some 2,200 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, perished when the South Fork Dam holding
back Lake Conemaugh collapsed, sending 20 million tons of water rushing through the town.
In 1669, English diarist Samuel Pepys (peeps) wrote the final entry of his journal, blaming his failing eyesight for his inability to continue.

In 1790, President George Washington signed into law the first U.S. copyright act. 
In 1910, the Union of South Africa was founded.

In 1913, U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan proclaimed the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing for popular election of U.S. senators, to be in effect.
In 1935, movie studio 20th Century Fox was created through a merger of the Fox Film Corp. and Twentieth Century Pictures.

In 1949, former State Department official and accused spy Alger Hiss went on trial in New York, charged with perjury (the jury deadlocked, but Hiss was convicted in a second trial).
In 1961, South Africa became an independent republic as it withdrew from the British Commonwealth.

In 1962, former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel a few minutes before midnight for his role in the Holocaust.
In 1977, the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, three years in the making, was completed.

In 1989, House Speaker Jim Wright, dogged by questions about his ethics, announced he would resign. (Tom Foley later succeeded him.)
In 1994, the United States announced it was no longer aiming long-range nuclear missiles at targets in the former Soviet Union.

In 2004, Presidential politics took a back seat on Memorial Day as President George W. Bush paid tribute at Arlington National Cemetery to America's fighting forces while Sen. John Kerry visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A bomb ripped through a Shiite (SHEE'-eyet) Muslim mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, during evening prayers, killing at least 19 people. Alberta Martin, one of the last widows of a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, died in Enterprise, Alabama, at age 97.

In 2009, Dr. George Tiller, a rare provider of late-term abortions, was shot and killed in a Wichita, Kansas, church. (Gunman Scott Roeder was later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 50 years.) Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, died in Southampton, England at 97.

In 2013,A tornado in the Oklahoma City metro area claimed eight lives, including those of storm chasers Tim Samaras, his son, Paul, and Carl Young; 13 people died in flash flooding. Four firefighters searching for people in a blazing Houston motel and restaurant were killed when part of the structure collapsed. Actress Jean Stapleton, who played Archie Bunker's far better half, the sweetly naive Edith, in TV's groundbreaking 1970s comedy "All in the Family," died in New York at age 90.