This Day in History: May 6

The Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey, which marked the end of the era of passenger-carrying airships.   (Photo by Sam Shere/Getty Images)

On this day, May 6 ...

1937: The hydrogen-filled German airship Hindenburg catches fire and crashes while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, N.J.; 35 of the 97 people on board are killed along with a crewman on the ground.

Also on this day:

• 1889: The Paris Exposition formally opens, featuring the just-completed Eiffel Tower.
• 1910: Britain’s Edwardian era ends with the death of King Edward VII; he is succeeded by George V.
• 1915: Babe Ruth hits his first major-league home run as a player for the Boston Red Sox.
• 1915: Actor-writer-director Orson Welles is born in Kenosha, Wis.
• 1941: Bob Hope does his first USO show before an audience of servicemen as he broadcasts his radio program from March Field in Riverside, Calif.
• 1974: West German Chancellor Willy Brandt resigns after one of his aides was exposed as an East German spy.
• 1994: Former Arkansas state worker Paula Jones files suit against President Bill Clinton, alleging he’d sexually harassed her in 1991.
• 2013: Kidnap-rape victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, who went missing separately about a decade earlier while in their teens or early 20s, are rescued from a house just south of downtown Cleveland. (Their captor, Ariel Castro, would hang himself in prison in September 2013 at the beginning of a life sentence plus 1,000 years.)
• 2014: A federal report says global warming is rapidly affecting the United States in both visible and invisible ways.
• 2014:The Vatican discloses that over the past decade, it defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties.

• 2019: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin denies House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal's request for President Trump's tax returns, saying the request lacked a "legitimate legislative purpose."

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• 2019: Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, welcome their firstborn child, a baby boy they would name Archie.