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Our on this day in history archives contain over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few more of them:

May 4 is the 124th day of the year (125th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 241 days remain until the end of the year.

EVENTS

1415 – Religious reformers John Wycliffe and Jan Hus are condemned as heretics at the Council of Constance.

1493 – Pope Alexander VI divides the New World between Spain and Portugal along the Line of Demarcation.

1626 – Dutch explorer Peter Minuit arrives in New Netherland (present day Manhattan Island) aboard the See Meeuw.

1686 – The Municipality of Ilagan is founded in the Philippines.

1738 – The Imperial Theatrical School, now known as Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, was founded under the reign of Empress Anna. It is the first ballet school in Russia and second in the world.

1776 – Rhode Island becomes the first American colony to renounce allegiance to King George III.

1871 – The National Association, the first professional baseball league, opens its first season in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

1904 – The United States begins construction of the Panama Canal.

1927 – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is incorporated.

1932 – In Atlanta, mobster Al Capone begins serving an eleven-year prison sentence for tax evasion.

1946 – In San Francisco Bay, U.S. Marines from the nearby Treasure Island Naval Base stop a two-day riot at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Five people are killed in the riot.

1949 – The entire Torino football team (except for two players who did not take the trip: Sauro Tomà, due to an injury and Renato Gandolfi, because of coach request) is killed in a plane crash.

1953 – Ernest Hemingway wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.

1959 – The 1st Annual Grammy Awards are held.

1961 – American civil rights movement: The "Freedom Riders" begin a bus trip through the South.

1961 – Malcolm Ross and Victor Prather attain a new altitude record for manned balloon flight ascending in the Strato-Lab V open gondola to 113,740 feet (34.67 km).

1970 – Vietnam War: Kent State shootings: The Ohio National Guard, sent to Kent State University after disturbances in the city of Kent the weekend before, opens fire killing four unarmed students and wounding nine others. The students were protesting the Cambodian Campaign of the United States and South Vietnam.

1973 – The 108-story Sears Tower in Chicago is topped out at 1,451 feet (442 m) as the world's tallest building.

1979 – Margaret Thatcher becomes the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

1989 – Space Shuttle Atlantis launches on mission STS-30 to deploy the Venus-bound Magellan space probe.

1998 – A federal judge in Sacramento, California, gives "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski four life sentences plus 30 years after Kaczynski accepts a plea agreement sparing him from the death penalty.

2007 – Greensburg, Kansas is almost completely destroyed by a 1.7-mile wide EF5 tornado. It was the first-ever tornado to be rated as such with the new Enhanced Fujita scale.

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