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Today is Sunday, May 31, the 151st day of 2026. There are 214 days left in the year.
On May 31, 1889, over 2,200 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, died when the South Fork Dam collapsed, sending 20 million tons of water from Conemaugh Lake rushing through the town.
In 1790, President George Washington signed into law the first U.S. copyright act.
In 1921, a two-day massacre erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as white mobs began looting and burning the affluent Black district of Greenwood over reports a Black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator; though the exact number remains unknown, as many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed during the riot.
In 1949, former State Department official and accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss went on trial in New York, charged with perjury (the trial ended with a hung jury, but Hiss was convicted in a second trial.)
In 1970, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck the Ancash region of Peru; the quake, combined with the landslide it triggered, killed an estimated 67,000 people.
In 1977, the 800-mile-long (1,300-kilometer) Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed after three years of construction.
In 2005, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein confirmed a Vanity Fair magazine report naming former FBI official W. Mark Felt as the Watergate scandal informant previously known only as “Deep Throat.”
In 2009, Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, died in Hampshire, England at 97.
In 2014, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier held prisoner in Afghanistan, was freed by the Taliban in exchange for five Afghan detainees from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Bergdahl, who’d gone missing in June 2009, later pleaded guilty to endangering his comrades by walking away from his post in Afghanistan; his sentence included a dishonorable discharge but no prison time.)
In 2019, a longtime city employee opened fire in a municipal building in Virginia Beach, Virginia, killing 12 people on three floors before police shot and killed him; officials said DeWayne Craddock had resigned by email hours before the shooting.
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