Today in History....May 21

On this day in …

* 1542, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto died while searching for gold along the Mississippi River

* 1832, the first Democratic National Convention got under way in Baltimore

* 1840, New Zealand was declared a British colony

* 1861, the Confederate Congress, meeting in Montgomery, Ala., voted to move the capital of the Confederacy from Montgomery to Richmond, Va.

* 1881, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross.

* 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis near Paris, completing the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean

* 1956, the U.S. exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific

* 1982, during the Falklands War, British amphibious forces landed on the beach at San Carlos Bay

* 1997, prosecutors at the Oklahoma City bombing trial of Timothy McVeigh rested their case. ALSO: The space shuttle Atlantis undocked from the Russian Mir space station

* 2006, Iraq's new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, promised to use "maximum force" if necessary to end the brutal insurgent and sectarian violence racking his country