Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan grew up in the nearby town of Hibbing in a close-knit Jewish family. His father, Abram Zimmerman, worked for Standard Oil, and his mother, Beatrice Stone Zimmerman, came from a family of...

Born on May 23, 1934, in New York City, Robert Moog grew up surrounded by a love of learning and invention. His father, George Moog, was an engineer at Con Edison, and his mother, Shirley, was a teacher. From a young age, Robert showed a deep fascination with...

On May 22, 1813, Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany. He would go on to become one of the most influential and controversial figures in the history of Western music. Wagner's operas and musical theories revolutionized the art form, pushing boundaries in terms...

Ferruccio Busoni’s opera Doktor Faust, left unfinished at his death in 1924, had its posthumous premiere on May 21, 1925, in Dresden. Busoni, an Italian composer, pianist, and visionary musical thinker, was fascinated by themes of ambition, knowledge, and the...

The creation of the Kinetoscope was largely the work of William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a brilliant Scottish inventor who joined Thomas Edison’s laboratory in 1883. Although Edison conceptualized the idea of a device that could "do for the eye what the phonograph does...

The word photography, derived from the Greek words photos meaning “light” and graphein meaning “to draw,” was first introduced in 1839 by the British scientist Sir John Herschel. While many inventors were experimenting with ways to capture images using light, it was...

In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, delivering a landmark decision on the boundaries of fair use in visual art.On May 18, 2023, the Court held, in a 7–2 ruling, that the Andy Warhol Foundation’s...

On May 17, 1912, the opera Don Quichotte, composed by Jules Massenet, had its London premiere at the London Opera House. Produced by Oscar Hammerstein, this marked the first time the opera was performed in England. The title role was sung by the legendary Russian bass...

On May 16, 1919, Władziu Valentino Liberace was born in West Allis, Wisconsin, to a family steeped in music and cultural richness. His father, Salvatore Liberace, was an Italian immigrant and a French horn player in silent movie orchestras, while his mother, Frances...

On this day in 1913, the ballet Jeux made its bold debut at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky and set to an evocative score by Claude Debussy, the production was presented by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and produced under...