Today is Friday, May 20, the 141st day of 2016. There are 225 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On May 20, 1916, the Saturday Evening Post published its first Norman Rockwell cover; the illustration shows a scowling boy dressed in his Sunday best, dutifully pushing a baby carriage past a couple of young baseball players, one of whom mockingly doffs his cap.

On this date:

In 1712, the original version of Alexander Pope’s satirical mockheroic poem “ The Rape of the Lock” was published anonymously in Lintot’s Miscellany.

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which was intended to encourage settlements west of the Mississippi River by making federal land available for farming.

In 1902, the United States ended a three-year military presence in Cuba as the Republic of Cuba was established under its first elected president, Tomas Estrada Palma.

In 1925, the newly built headquarters of the United States Chamber of Commerce was formally dedicated in Washington, D.C.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, New York, aboard the Spirit of St. Louis on his historic solo flight to France.

In 1932, Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. (Because of weather and equipment problems, Earhart set down in Northern Ireland instead of her intended destination, France.)

In 1942, during World War II, the Office of Civilian Defense was established.

In 1956, the United States exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.

In 1961, a white mob attacked a busload of Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama, prompting the federal government to send in U.S. marshals to restore order.

In 1970, some 100,000 people demonstrated in New York’s Wall Street district in support of U.S. policy in Vietnam and Cambodia.

In 1988, Laurie Dann, 30, walked into a Winnetka, Illinois, elementary school classroom, where she shot to death 8-year-old Nicholas Corwin and wounded several other children. After wounding a young man at his home, Dann took her own life.

In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans, struck down, 6-3, a Colorado measure banning laws that protected homosexuals from discrimination.

Ten years ago: Iraq’s new unity government took office, five months after elections. Federal agents searched the Capitol Hill office of U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., as part of a bribery investigation. (Jefferson was convicted in 2009 of taking bribes; he received a 13-year federal prison sentence.)

The Associated Press