William Harvey Carney (1840 – 1908)

Recognized for heroically protecting the American flag during
the Civil War, Army Sgt. William Harvey Carney received the
Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, on
May 23, 1900.

The first Black American service member to earn the award,
Carney was born into slavery in Virginia in 1840. Although a
handful of other Black service members had already received
the medal, Carney’s award celebrated an earlier action. He
was one of many Civil War-era honorees to be granted the
medal decades later.

    
    
    
    
On May 23, 1934, notorious bandits and serial murderers Bonnie
Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death by Texas and
Louisiana state police near Sailes, Louisiana.

 
   
 Death car on display in the Bonnie & Clyde Ambush Museum
in Gibsland, La.  

Actual photos of the ambush aftermath are also presented at the museum along with one of Clyde’s Remington shotguns, a tire
Clyde stole and gave to an old man who kept it as a souvenir;
Bonnie’s red hat, some glass from the death car windshield,
and replicas of Bonnie and Clyde’s tombstones in a simulated
graveyard. There’s also a large mural that fills one wall recreating
the moment of the ambush.

The Moscow Summit of 1972 was a meeting between President
Richard M. Nixon (right) of the United States and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It
was held May 22–30, 1972. It featured the signing of the Anti-
Ballistic Missile Treaty(below) the first Strategic Arms Limitation
Treaty and the U.S.–Soviet Incidents at Sea agreement.

The summit is considered one of the hallmarks of the détente at
the time between the two Cold War antagonists.

On this day in 1843, the first major wagon train to the northwest
departed from Elm Grove, Missouri, on the Oregon Trail. 

Some 1,000 men, women, and children climbed aboard their
wagons and steered their horses west.  

October 1, 1962 – May 22, 1992 on NBC

Ed McMahon (left) served as Carson’s sidekick and the
show’s announcer.