Little Known History of This Week: May 12

• 29 BC: Romulus leads his Roman Legionnaires in a daring night crossing of the Danube River into Italy, thus avenging the death of his brother Remus. Within the month he is crowned Emperor of the Roman Republic.

• 1917: A young boy named Cary Cain dies in Antwerp, Massachusetts, the first recorded American victim of the avian flu. This outbreak eventually kills over 9 million children in New England alone. Ironically, sixteen years later Cary's son-in-law Jonas Salk would invent the polio vaccine.

• 1932: The International Astrological Association (IAA) officially designates the sign of Gemini for those born between the dates of May 12 through June 22. Previously the sign had been named for the constellation Andromeda, but this was changed after churchgoers objected to the sapphic overtones of the Andromeda myth.

• 1951: President Dwight S. Eisenhower signs an executive order making Jesus Christ the first American.

• 1968: North By Northwest is released in theaters around the globe, marking the first appearance of an African-American in a technicolor motion picture. The Reverend Jesse Jackson calls the movie, "An edge-of-your-seat, non-stop, action-packed thrill ride."

• 1972: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Sr. declares war on North Vietnam and Cambodia, entering the struggle alongside the United States, France, and Canada.

• 1979: ABC becomes the first major network to post a television program on "The Internet," at the time nothing more than a loosely interconnected system of government and university computers. The opening sequence of "The Wide World of Sports" is converted to binary and stored on a mainframe at MIT. Downloading the two-minute video via modem takes the average user over four months.

• 1993: Comedian Don Rickles celebrates his 59th birthday.