Today in History....May15

On this day in …

* 1607, English colonists went ashore in Virginia to begin building a permanent settlement, named Jamestown after England's King James I

* 1643, Louis XIV became King of France at age 4 upon the death of his father, Louis XV

* 1796, English physician Edward Jenner administered the first vaccination against smallpox to 8-year-old James Phipps by using cowpox matter

* 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Louisiana Territory left St. Louis

* 1942, Congress voted to establish the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps

* 1973, the United States launched Skylab I, its first manned space station

* 1975, U.S. forces raided the Cambodian island of Koh Tang and recaptured the American merchant ship Mayaguez. All 40 crew members had already been released safely by Cambodia, but some 40 U.S.
servicemen were killed in the military operation

* 1997, jurors at the Timothy McVeigh trial in Denver saw chilling black-and-white surveillance pictures of a Ryder truck moving toward the Oklahoma City federal building minutes before a bomb blew the place apart

* 2002, NATO and Russia reached a historic agreement to combat common security threats in the post-Sept. 11 era. Former President Jimmy Carter addressed Cubans in an unprecedented hour of live, uncensored television --- telling them that their country did not meet international standards of democracy

* 2006, Mexican President Vicente Fox telephoned President Bush to express his concern about the border between the two nations, a day before Bush's planned Oval Office speech on immigration. ALSO: Rene Preval was sworn in as Haiti's president for the second time in a decade.