Updated May 26, 2014, 10:57 am
On May 26, 1868, the Senate impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson ended with his acquittal as the Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction.
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On May 26, 1907, John Wayne, the American actor famous for his roles in western movies, was born. Following his death on June 11, 1979, his obituary appeared in The Times.
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On This Date
| 1521 | Martin Luther was declared an outlaw and his writings were banned by the Edict of Worms. |
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| 1805 | Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned king of Italy. |
| 1868 | The impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson ended with his acquittal as the Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction. |
| 1896 | The Dow Jones Industrial Average was first published. The average price of the 11 initial stocks was 40.94 |
| 1908 | The first major oil strike in the Middle East took place as engineers working for British entrepreneur William Knox D'Arcy hit a gusher in Masjid-i-Suleiman in present-day Iran. |
| 1969 | Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a mission that served as a dress rehearsal for the first moon landing. |
| 1972 | President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in Moscow. |
| 1977 | George H. Willig scaled the outside of the south tower of New York's World Trade Center; he was arrested at the top of the 110-story building. |
| 1978 | The first legal casino in the eastern United States opened in Atlantic City, N.J. |
| 1994 | Pop star Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley were married in the Dominican Republic. |
| 1998 | The Supreme Court ruled that Ellis Island - historic gateway for millions of immigrants - is mainly in New Jersey, not New York. |
| 2004 | Terry Nichols was found guilty of 161 state murder charges for helping carry out the Oklahoma City bombing. |
| 2009 | President Barack Obama nominated federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to be the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. |
| 2009 | California's Supreme Court upheld the Proposition 8 gay marriage ban but said the 18,000 same-sex weddings that had taken place before the prohibition passed were still valid. |
| 2011 | Congress passed a four-year extension of post-Sept. 11 powers contained in the Patriot Act to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists. |
| 2011 | Ratko Mladic, the brutal Bosnian Serb general suspected of leading the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, was arrested after a 16-year manhunt. |
Historic Birthdays
John Wayne 5/26/1907 - 6/11/1979 American film actor.Go to obituary »
| 87 | Helen Eugenie Anderson 5/26/1909 - 3/31/1997 American ambassador to Denmark; first woman to serve as U.S. ambassador |
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| 84 | Robert Morley 5/26/1908 - 6/3/1992 English actor, director and playwright |
| 70 | Dorothea Lange 5/26/1895 - 10/11/1965 American documentary photographer |
| 94 | Salo Wittmayer Baron 5/26/1895 - 11/25/1989 Austrian-born American historian |
| 64 | Al Jolson 5/26/1886 - 10/23/1950 American stage and film singer and comedian |
| 50 | Isadora Duncan 5/26/1877 - 9/14/1927 American dancer |
| 85 | Olaf Gulbransson 5/26/1873 - 9/18/1958 Norwegian-born German illustrator and satirist |
| 54 | Robert Fitzsimmons 5/26/1863 - 10/22/1917 English-born world boxing champion in three weight divisions between 1891 and 1903 |
| 89 | Washington Roebling 5/26/1837 - 7/21/1926 American civil engineer; designed the Brooklyn Bridge |
| 38 | Aleksandr Pushkin 5/26/1799 (O.S.) - 1/29/1837 (O.S.) Russian poet, novelist, dramatist and short-story writer |