May 17 in Pop Culture History
1536 – The annulment of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s marriage.
1792 – The New York Stock Exchange was formed.
1875 – Aristides won the first Kentucky Derby.
1890 – Comic Cuts, the first British weekly comic paper, was published in London by Alfred Northcliffe.
1900 – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, was published with an initial 10,000 copies.
1952 # 1 Hit May 17, 1952 – June 20, 1952: Leroy Anderson – Blue Tango
1954 – The US Supreme Court handed down an unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling that racial segregation in public educational facilities was unconstitutional.
1955 – Nathan Kline, appeared before the U.S. Congress to explain his work with Reserpine, an early antihypertensive/ antipsychotic psychopharmacology drug.
1958 # 1 Hit May 17, 1958 – June 13, 1958: The Everly Brothers – All I Have To Do Is Dream
1965 – Written in 1955, the FBI Laboratory, after a formal investigation that began in 1964, declared the lyrics of Louie Louie to be officially ‘Unintelligible at any speed.’
1970 – Thor Heyerdahl and a multinational crew set out from Morocco across the Atlantic Ocean in Ra II in 57 days.
1986 # 1 Hit May 17, 1986 – June 6, 1986: Whitney Houston – Greatest Love of All
2000 – The final episode of Beverly Hills 90210 aired on FOX.
2004 – The first legal same-sex marriages in the US were performed in the state of Massachusetts.
2014 # 1 Hit May 17, 2014 – June 6, 2014: John Legend – All of Me