On this day…2nd May

1194 – King Richard I of England gives Portsmouth its first Royal Charter.

1536 – Anne Boleyn is arrested and taken to the Tower of London.

1780 – William Herschel discovers the first binary star, Xi Ursae Majoris.

1829 – After anchoring nearby, Captain Charles Fremantle of HMS Challenger, declares the Swan River Colony in Western Australia.

Captain Charles Fremantle

1833 – Russian Tsar Nicholas I bans the public sale of serfs.

1885 – ‘Good Housekeeping’ magazine is first published.

1887 – Hannibal Goodwin patents the celluloid photographic film (used in Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope).

1906 – Tsar Nicholas II of Russia dismisses his moderate Prime Minister Witte, and appoints Ivan Goremykin, a conservative beaurocrat.

1929 – Billie Holiday (14) and her mother are arrested for prostitution following a raid of a brothel in Harlem.

1936 – Sergei Prokofiev’s musical ‘Peter and the Wolf’ premieres in Moscow.

1936 – Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and family flee Abyssinia.

1946 – The ‘Battle of Alcatraz’ takes place, killing two guards and three inmates.

1946 – ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ film based on the novel by James M. Cain, directed by Tay Garnett, and starring Lana Turner and John Garfield is released.

1949 – Arthur Miller wins the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Death of a Salesman’.

1968 – Israeli television begins transmitting.

1979 – ‘Quadrophenia’ premieres in London.

1980 – Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ is banned in South Africa.

1982 – Falklands War: Argentine cruise General Belgrano is sunk by British submarine Conqueror, killing more than 350 men.

1988 – Jackson Pollock’s ‘Search’ is sold for $4,800,000.

1997 – Police arrest trans-sexual prostitute Atisone Seiuli with Eddie Murphy.

2011 – Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and FBI’s most wanted man is killed by US Special Forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

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