Important Events From This day in History – 10 May

Today in History

• 1994 Nelson Mandela becomes South Africa’s first black president

  After more than 300 years of white rule, Mandela was inaugurated. He was a pivotal figure in the fight against the racist apartheid regime before becoming president, and he was imprisoned for 27 years.

• 1954 Bill Haley releases “Rock Around the Clock”

  It was the first rock song to top the Billboard charts and has become a classic of the early rock era.

• 1941 Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, parachutes into Scotland to broker a peace agreement

  Hess was apprehended and questioned. He was the most recent in a long line of prominent figures imprisoned in the Tower of London. Hitler labeled his peace mission four years before World War II’s end as treason.

• 1933 Nazis ceremonially burn about 25,000 allegedly “un-German” books

  The book burnings were part of the right-wing German Student Union’s Anti-Un-German Spirit Action. Works by Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka were among those destroyed.

• 1869 In the United States, the first coast-to-coast railroad is completed

  A “Golden Spike” was used to connect the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad systems at Promontory Summit in Utah. This final spike is now on display at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Museum.