The Pact of Steel is signed; the Axis is formed

In the opening battle of England’s War of the Roses, the Yorkists defeat King Henry VI’s Lancastrian forces at St. Albans, 20 miles northwest of London. Many Lancastrian nobles perished, including Edmund Beaufort, the duke of Somerset, and the king was forced to submit to the rule of his cousin, Richard of York. The dynastic […]

Hearing arguments in the case of the Zong, a slave ship, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in London states that a massacre of enslaved African “was the same as if Horses had been thrown over board” on May 22, 1783. The crew of the Zong had thrown at least 130 captive Africans into […]

The Great Emigration of 1843 marked the first major wagon trail to head west on the Oregon Trail.

It’s the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of master sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was born in Scotland and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he met Dr. Joseph Bell, a teacher with extraordinary deductive reasoning power. Bell partly inspired Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes years later. After medical school, Doyle moved […]

On May 22, 1972, President Richard Nixon arrives in Moscow for a summit with Soviet leaders. Although it was Nixon’s first visit to the Soviet Union as president, he had visited Moscow once before–as U.S. vice president. As Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon made frequent official trips abroad, including a 1959 trip to Moscow to tour […]

After 150 years apart, Marxist South Yemen and conservative North Yemen are unified as the Republic of Yemen. Ali Abdullah, president of North Yemen, became the new country’s president, and Ali Salem Al-Baidh, leader of the South Yemeni Socialist Party, vice president. The first free elections were held in 1993. Situated at the southern tip […]

On May 22, 2004, President George Bush is in a bicycle accident. Bush had taken up mountain biking for exercise at the suggestion of physicians. Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank recounted how Bush fell from his mountain bike while completing a 17-mile course on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Despite scrapes and scratches on his […]

Just moments after Ariana Grande finished the final song of her May 22, 2017 concert at Manchester Arena, a suicide bomber detonated an explosion on the premises, killing 22 concertgoers and injuring 116 more. ISIS claimed responsibility for what was the deadliest act of terrorism in Britain since the 2005 London metro bombings. A scene of youthful fun […]