Thursday, May 10 1655 - Jamaica was taken by the British after being in Spanish hands for 161 years.

1796 - Napoleon Bonaparte's army of Italy defeated the Austrians under Baron Beaulieu in the battle of Lodi, southeast of Milan. Over 2,000 Austrians were killed or wounded.

1857 - The Sepoy uprising against occupying British forces in India broke out.

1863 - Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, Confederate general in the American Civil War, died eight days after being accidentally shot by his own troops.

1869 - The U.S. Pacific railroad was completed when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines were joined at Promontory, Utah.

1881 - King Carol I, Romania's first king, was crowned.

1925 - William Ferguson Massey, New Zealand statesman and prime minister (1912-25), died in office.

1933 - Nazis, nationalist students and professors in black robes gathered on a square in central Berlin to burn books by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht and other authors condemned by Adolf Hitler's followers as "un-German".

1940 - Germany invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium; following the German invasion of Denmark, British troops occupied Denmark's former colony of Iceland.

1941 - Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, flew from Augsburg and parachuted down near Glasgow, Scotland, in an apparent attempt to negotiate a peace deal. He was arrested and imprisoned for the rest of the war.

1960 - The U.S. nuclear-powered submarine Triton completed its 4-day submerged voyage around the world.

1963 - Pope John XXIII received the Balzan Peace Prize, the first peace prize ever awarded to a pope.

1972 - A referendum in the Republic of Ireland gave an 83 percent majority in favor of joining The European Economic Community.

1981 - In West Germany, the Social Democrats lost elections in West Berlin for the first time since World War II.

1993 - Over 200 workers were killed when a fire destroyed a Thai toy factory in Nakhon Pathom Province.

1994 - Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa's first black president.

1994 - Media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi took office as Italy's prime minister at the head of a government that brought neo-fascists to power for the first time since 1945.

1995 - Britain lifted a 23-year ban on ministerial talks with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

1996 - Indian prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao resigned after his Congress Party was mauled in general elections.

1997 - 1,560 people were killed and 2,810 injured when an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale rocked rural areas of eastern Iran.

1999 - Brazil formally granted political asylum to Paraguay's disgraced former president Raul Cubas and his family.