On May 18, 1896, the United States Supreme Court handed down one of the most infamous decisions in American constitutional history. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court ruled that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution so long as the facilities provided to Black…
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On May 18, 1933, as the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression continued to erode confidence in the American system, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Tennessee Valley Authority Act—a legislative cornerstone of the New Deal and a radical assertion of federal…
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On May 17, 1900, L. Frank Baum gave the first copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to his sister, Mary Louise Baum Brewster, marking the quiet beginning of one of the most enduring works in American children’s literature. The book, first published in…
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On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court issued its most far-reaching pronouncement on the nature of constitutional equality since Reconstruction—a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which categorically repudiated the legal fiction of “separate but equal” and declared…
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On May 16, 1866, the United States Congress authorized a new five-cent coin made primarily of nickel, giving rise to one of the most familiar pieces of American currency. The coin was small, practical, and durable, but its creation reflected something larger than a…
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Sir Thomas More’s resignation as Lord Chancellor on May 16, 1532, did not provoke a riot in the streets or a dramatic rupture in the Tudor court—but it marked, with grave finality, the moment when one of England’s most brilliant minds stepped away from…
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On May 15, 1911, the United States Supreme Court delivered one of the most consequential antitrust decisions in American history, ruling in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States that John D. Rockefeller’s oil empire had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and…
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On May 15, 1536, Anne Boleyn—Queen of England, second wife of Henry VIII, and mother of the future Elizabeth I—stood trial at the Tower of London. The charges were staggering: adultery, incest, and high treason. The outcome was foreordained. Condemned by a hand-picked jury…
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On May 14, 1610, France lost the king who had ended its religious wars and gained a child monarch who inherited both his throne and his unfinished work. Henry IV, the first Bourbon king of France, was assassinated in Paris by François Ravaillac, a…
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In a bizarre legal footnote to American religious history—and a final echo of the spectral hysteria that once gripped colonial New England—the last case resembling a witchcraft trial in the United States began not in the 17th century, but in 1878. Nearly two centuries…
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