May 1 – Calamity Jane, frontier adventuress
May 3 – Niccolo Machiavelli, Italian writer
May 4 – Audrey Hepburn, actress
May 5 – Karl Marx, founder of modern communism
May 6 – Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst
May 8 – Harry S. Truman, 33rd president
May 10 – Fred Astaire, dancing actor
May 11 – Salvador Dali, artist
May 12 – Florence Nightingale, nurse
May 14 – Gabriel Fahrenheit, German physicist
May 19 – Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese leader
May 19 – Malcolm X, activist
May 25 – Ralph Waldo Emerson, author
May 26 – Isadora Duncan, interpretive dancer
May 26 – Sally Ride, astronaut
May 27 – Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state
May 29 – Patrick Henry, said “Give me liberty or give me death.”
May 29 – John F. Kennedy, 35th President
May 30 – Joan of Arc, French heroine
May 31 – Walt Whitman, author