Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/May 24

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 * 1667 – Led by King Louis XIV, the French army invaded the Spanish Netherlands, beginning the War of Devolution.
 * 1683 – Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum, the world's first university museum, opened.
 * 1738 – At a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate, London, John Wesley (pictured) experienced a spiritual rebirth, leading him to launch the Methodist movement.
 * 1830 – The nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was first published as a poem by Sarah Josepha Hale.
 * 1883 – New York City's Brooklyn Bridge opened as the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time.
 * 1930 – English aviator Amy Johnson landed in Darwin, becoming the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia.
 * 1913 – Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia married Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover; the occasion was one of the last great social events of European royalty before World War I began.
 * 1941 – Second World War: The German battleship Bismarck sank the British battlecruiser HMS Hood at the Battle of the Denmark Strait.
 * 1948 – Arab–Israeli War: After five days of fighting, Egyptian forces captured the Israeli community of Yad Mordechai after the defenders had abandoned it.
 * 1956 – The first edition of the Eurovision Song Contest was held in Lugano, Switzerland.
 * 1962 – Project Mercury: American astronaut Scott Carpenter orbited the Earth three times in the Aurora 7 space capsule.
 * 1970 – On the Kola Peninsula in Russia, drilling began on the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which eventually reached a depth of 12262 m, making it the deepest borehole ever drilled and the lowest artificial point on Earth.
 * 1976 – In a wine competition in Paris, French judges shocked the wine industry by rating California wines higher than French ones.
 * 1986 – A stationary front began over the central Caribbean Sea, leading to severe floods that over two weeks killed dozens of people in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica.
 * 1988 – Section 28 of the United Kingdom's Local Government Act of 1988, a controversial amendment stating that a local authority cannot intentionally promote homosexuality, was enacted.
 * 1991 – The Israel Defense Forces began Operation Solomon, a covert operation to bring thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel (evacuees pictured).
 * 2006 – An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary film that has been credited for raising international public awareness of climate change and re-energizing the environmental movement, was released.
 * Born/died: | Lanfranc |d|1089| David I of Scotland |d|1153| Nicolaus Copernicus |d|1543| Elizabeth Carey, Lady Berkeley |b|1576| Marek Sobieski |b|1628| Cathinka Buchwieser |b|1789| Henry Sandham |b|1842| Annette von Droste-Hülshoff |d|1848| Arthur Wing Pinero |b|1855| Jan Smuts |b|1870| Fanny Searls |d|1939| Carmine Infantino|b|1925| Guy Tardif |d|2005| Huguette Clark |d|2011|