What happened on 4 May?

20 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1979 Margaret Thatcher's premiership Britain's first woman prime minister: the Falklands, the miners' strike, privatisation, and eleven years that remade the country.
2. 1654 Born: Kangxi Emperor Long-reigning Qing emperor who consolidated Manchu rule and patronised scholarship.
3. 1919 May Fourth Movement Student protests over the Versailles settlement ignite Chinese nationalism.
4. 1979 Thatcher becomes Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wins 1979 election; first woman PM; begins eleven years of Conservative dominance.
5. 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea First naval battle fought entirely between aircraft from carriers; checks Japanese advance toward Australia.
6. 1929 Born: Audrey Hepburn Belgian-born actress; Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany's, My Fair Lady.
7. 1980 Death of Tito The partisan who built and held Yugoslavia for 35 years dies at 87, and 128 states send delegations to the largest state funeral in history to that date. He leaves a rotating eight
8. 1961 Freedom Rides Civil rights activists ride buses through the segregated South.
9. 1814 Napoleon's ten months on Elba Sovereign of an island of twelve thousand souls, Napoleon reorganises Elba's iron mines, roads and tiny navy with undiminished energy — while reading the Paris papers, noting the B
10. 1471 Battle of Tewkesbury Edward IV crushes the Lancastrians; Edward of Westminster killed; Henry VI murdered in the Tower of London weeks later.
11. 1970 Cambodian Campaign / Kent State shootings Nixon orders invasion of Cambodia; protests erupt across US universities; National Guard kills four at Kent State.
12. 1959 Truffaut's The 400 Blows New Wave debut about Antoine Doinel — autobiographical childhood film.
13. 1864 Grant's Overland Campaign Grant crosses the Rapidan and grapples Lee for forty days of near-continuous fighting — the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor — losing 55,000 men and refusing, unlike every pre
14. 1926 General Strike of 1926 9-day TUC sympathy strike in support of miners; collapses without concessions; weakens the labour movement for a generation.
15. 1951 Festival of Britain Post-war national exhibition along the South Bank celebrating recovery and modernity.
16. 1493 Inter caetera Alexander VI's bull draws a line from pole to pole 100 leagues west of the Azores, granting Spain all newly found lands beyond it — the basis renegotiated a year later at Tordesill
17. 1945 German surrender at Lüneburg Heath In a tent on Lüneburg Heath, Montgomery accepts the surrender of all German forces in north-west Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark.
18. 1864 Ludwig II becomes Wagner's patron The 18-year-old King of Bavaria pays off Wagner's debts and summons him to Munich — the rescue that makes the Ring and Bayreuth possible.
19. 1977 Frost/Nixon interviews In paid television interviews with David Frost, Nixon concedes he 'let the American people down' and declares 'when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal'.
20. 1939 Finnegans Wake Seventeen years in the writing, Joyce's last book dissolves English into a punning dream-language of the night — the most notoriously difficult novel in the language.