FRIDAY, May 16, 2025

1689-Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō leaves Edo on his epic 150-day journey to Honshū Island in Japan which he writes about in the literary masterpiece “Oku no Hosomichi” (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).

1868-U.S. Senate fails to impeach President Andrew Johnson by one vote

1920-French heroine Joan of Arc is canonized as a saint by Pope Benedict XV

1943-Operation Chastise: No. 617 Squadron RAF begins the famous Dambusters Raid, bombing the Möhne and Eder dams in the Ruhr valley with bouncing bombs

1944-First of over 180,000 Hungarian Jews reaches Auschwitz

1989-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping meet in Beijing and formally end a 30-year rift

2013-Human stem cells are successfully cloned