May 4 · This Day in America
It is a Monday, a little after noon. Days earlier, President Nixon announced the war had crossed into Cambodia, and campuses erupted. At Kent State University in Ohio, students gather on the Commons; the National Guard, deployed days before, orders them to disperse. Near a hilltop pagoda, twenty-eight guardsmen turn and fire — between 61 and 67 rounds in thirteen seconds. Four students are killed, nine wounded. Some were protesters. Some were walking to class. The photograph of a girl screaming over a body went around the world. Within days the largest student strike in American history closed hundreds of colleges. The country had turned its weapons on its own children on its own grass, and it could not look away. Told plainly: this is what it cost when a nation argued with itself and forgot, for thirteen seconds, that the argument was the point.
Source: www.kent.edu
Also on this day · 1626
Peter Minuit arrives in New Netherland on May 4, 1626. Soon after, the Dutch record acquiring Manhattan for trade goods valued at 60 guilders — the origin of America's most famous real-estate story. Historians caution it was likely never a sale as the Dutch imagined it: the Lenape understood land differently, more shared use than deed. A founding myth, told as legend, sitting at the root of a city.
Source: archaeology.cityofnewyork.us