May 11

Events

330 - Byzantium is renamed Nova Roma during a dedication ceremony, but is more popularly referred to as Constantinople.
1310 - Fifty-four members of the Knights Templar are burned at the stake in France for being heretics.
1502 - Christopher Columbus leaves for his fourth and final voyage to the West Indies.
1792 - Captain Robert Gray becomes the first documented white person to sail into the Columbia River.
1858 - Minnesota is admitted as the 32nd U.S. state.
1867 - Luxembourg gains its independence.
1910 - An act of the U.S. Congress establishes Glacier National Park in Montana.
1949 - Israel joins the United Nations.
1960 - In Buenos Aires, Argentina, four Israeli Mossad agents capture Adolf Eichmann.
1987 - Klaus Barbie goes on trial in Lyon for alleged war crimes committed during World War II.

1752 - Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, German anthropologist (d. 1840)
1852 - Charles W. Fairbanks, United States Vice President (d. 1918)
1891 - Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury and advocate for the Morgenthau Plan (d. 1967)
1904 - Salvador Dalí, Spanish painter (d. 1989)
1933 - Louis Farrakhan, American Black Muslim leader