Churchill announces: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”

At the Battle of Langside, the forces of Mary Queen of Scots are defeated by a confederacy of Scottish Protestants under James Stewart, the regent of her son, King James VI of Scotland. During the battle, which was fought out in the southern suburbs of Glasgow, a cavalry charge routed Mary’s 6,000 Catholic troops, and […]

“Since leaving Paris yesterday we have passed through streets and streets of such murdered houses, through town after town spread out in its last writhings,” the celebrated novelist Edith Wharton writes on May 13, 1915, from the town of Nancy, in the Argonnes region of France. “And before the black holes that were homes, along […]

On May 13, 1920, the Socialist Party nominates Eugene V. Debs as its candidate for president in the upcoming November election. There’s a slight complication, though: Debs is serving a 10-year sentence at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta and isn’t due to get out until 1928. As the New York Tribune observes, “his nomination marks […]

On May 13, 1973, during the early years of the women’s liberation movement, tennis stars Bobby Riggs and Margaret Court face off in a $10,000 winner-take-all challenge match. The 55-year-old Riggs, a tennis champion from the late 1930s and ’40s who was notoriously skeptical of women’s talents on the tennis court, branded the contest a […]

On May 13, 1985 Philadelphia police begin evacuating people from their Osage Avenue homes in order to prepare for an operation against MOVE, a Black separatist group that had assembled a large arsenal. By the end of the botched confrontation, the police drop a bomb, leveling a city block, killing 11 people and incinerating 61 […]