A Brief History
This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on May 14th. For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event.
Digging Deeper
On May 14, 1796, English scientist Edward Jenner used pus scraped from a cowpox pustule to inoculate his gardener’s son, the first ever vaccine used.
On May 14, 1816, romantically linked English authors Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley arrived at Geneva, Switzerland.
On May 14, 1878, the town of Salem, Massachusetts, was fittingly (in a way) the scene of the last known trial for the crime of witchcraft in the United States.
On May 14, 1900, the athletic competition known as “the World Amateur championship” opened at the Paris Exposition Universelle, a World’s Fair held in Paris from April to November of 1900, one of several French hosted Expositions Universelle over the years.
On May 14, 1939, in Peru, 5 ½ year old Lina Medina became the youngest documented human mother in history.
On May 14, 1943, the Australian hospital ship AHS Centaur was torpedoed and sunk by Japanese Imperial Navy submarine I-177.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz, Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, a state independent upon the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine on May 15, 1948.
On May 14, 1955, eight communist nations in the orbit of the Soviet Union (USSR) signed a mutual defense pact military alliance, known as The Warsaw Pact.
On May 14, 1973, the United States launched Skylab, America’s first space station.
On May 14, 1988, Larry Mahoney, a convicted drunk driver, was driving on I-71 near Carrolton, Kentucky, a route to a cruel fate for 27 people riding in a church bus.
On May 14, 2008, one more sports related riot took place in Manchester, England, when fans of the Zenit Football Club of St. Petersburg, Russia, went hand and foot with fans of the Rangers Football Club of Glasgow, Scotland.
On May 14, 2016 in Curitiba, Brazil, heavyweight mixed martial arts fighter Stipe Miocic stunned the Brazilian crowd by knocking out reigning UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) heavyweight champ Fabricio Werdum early in the first round.
On May 14, 2018, we celebrated another one of those goofy pseudo-holidays, this time National Dance Like a Chicken Day, a day in which we acknowledge the superiority of that wedding reception standby (along with the Hokey Pokey), the Chicken Dance.
On May 14, 2019, a mere five days away from the HBO mega-hit television series, Game of Thrones series finale, we at History and Headlines were all too willing to provide our readers inclined to desperately want to know things ahead of time with SPOILERS!
On May 14, 2021, American horror film Spiral: From the Book of Saw was scheduled to be released in the United States by Lionsgate
On May 14, 2021, neo-Western survival action thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead was scheduled to be released in the United States by Warner Bros. Pictures in both theaters and on HBO Max for 31 days from theatrical release.
On May 14, 2021, we finally got to watch the latest Angelina Jolie action film, Those Who Wish Me Dead.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Andrews, John and Matt Baker. Timeline of World History. Thunder Bay Press, 2020.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.