Today in history—May 4

1493: In the bull Inter coetera, Pope Alexander VI tries to limit conflict between Spain and Portugal by providing that the Spanish can colonize everything west of a line 100 miles west of Cape Verde, while the Portuguese get the east.

1626: The Dutch East India Company’s Peter Minuit arrives at Manhattan Island to become the director of the Company’s New Netherland colony; his assignment is to buy the land from the local inhabitants.

1796: Horace Mann is born in poverty at Franklin, Massachusetts.  He will go on to become a successful Bay State lawyer, but will be best known as one of the leaders of the state common school system.

1871: America’s first professional baseball league, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, opens for business. It will fold five years later, but two of the original nine teams are still around: the Chicago Cubs and the Atlanta Braves.

1886: An angry labor protest meeting at Chicago’s Haymarket Square erupts into violence when someone throws a bomb at police, killing several, and police fire into the crowd.  This comes to be known as the Haymarket Riot.

1930: Lawyer Mohandas Gandhi becomes one of 60,000 people arrested by British India authorities for making their own salt in violation of law.

1932: Mobster Al Capone begins serving his ten-year sentence for income tax evasion at a federal prison in Atlanta.

1979: Margaret Thatcher becomes the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.  France is unimpressed. “I am not prepared,” Prime Minister Jacques Chirac will later sniff, “to accept the economics of a housewife.”