Shortly before midnight on June 2, 1919, a powerful explosion tore through the Washington, D.C., home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The blast shattered windows, damaged neighboring houses, and ripped apart the front of Palmer’s residence. Palmer, his wife, and their young daughter…
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The French Revolution crossed a fatal threshold on June 2, 1793, when François Hanriot, a failed clerk turned militant commander of the Paris National Guard, surrounded the National Convention at cannon-point and arrested 22 leading Girondist deputies—on orders not of the people, but of…
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On June 1, 1974, a short article appeared in the journal Emergency Medicine offering a remarkably simple answer to one of the most terrifying medical emergencies imaginable. A person eating dinner suddenly clutched his throat. He could not speak. He could not breathe. Within…
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By the final day of May 1864, the American Civil War had entered a new and increasingly brutal phase. For nearly four weeks, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had driven the Union Army of the Potomac southward through Virginia, refusing to retreat after battles…
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On May 30, 1431, in the Norman city of Rouen, the English-dominated tribunal that had spent months trying to destroy Joan of Arc finally delivered her to the fire. She was nineteen years old, a peasant girl from Domrémy who had become, in the…
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On May 31, 1879, a modest but consequential shift in New York City’s cultural topography took place: Gilmore’s Garden, a frequently repurposed arena at 26th Street and Madison Avenue, was renamed Madison Square Garden by railroad heir William Henry Vanderbilt. The name change was…
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On May 29, 363, Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate achieved one of the most impressive battlefield victories of late antiquity when his army defeated the forces of the Sasanian Empire outside the walls of Ctesiphon, the Persian capital. Yet the triumph would quickly turn…
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It began not with a battle cry, but with a refusal. On May 30, 1381, villagers in Brentwood, Essex, stood their ground against royal tax collectors—and in so doing, ignited one of the most explosive popular uprisings in English history. The Peasants’ Revolt, also…
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After more than two millennia, the Roman Empire—transfigured, fragmented, renamed, and reimagined—finally collapsed on May 29, 1453, as Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II breached the gates of Constantinople following a 53-day siege. With the city’s fall came the extinguishing of the last imperial…
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On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, one of the most consequential and destructive laws in American history. The measure authorized the president to negotiate treaties that would exchange Native lands east of the Mississippi River for territory farther…
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