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, 585 BC, an extraordinary event took place—an event so striking that it brought an ongoing war to a sudden halt. As two ancient armies prepared for battle under the Anatolian sky, darkness abruptly fell in the middle of the day. A…
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On May 27, 1703, Tsar Peter I—later styled “the Great”—ordered the construction of a fortress on a mosquito-infested island at the mouth of the Neva River. In doing so, he planted the imperial standard for what would become Saint Petersburg, a city forged not…
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By late spring 1865, the Confederacy was collapsing in pieces. Richmond had fallen, Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, and President Jefferson Davis was a fugitive. Yet the vast expanse of the Trans-Mississippi—stretching from Texas to Arkansas and parts of Louisiana—remained a Confederate holdout, largely…
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On May 25, 1961, in a bold speech delivered before a special joint session of the United States Congress, President John F. Kennedy issued a challenge that would define a generation and redirect the trajectory of American science, industry, and global prestige. Speaking just…
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On May 24, 1844, a slender copper wire running between the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and a Baltimore train depot carried more than just electrical signals—it bore the weight of a new era. At precisely 8:45 a.m., inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, seated…
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On May 23, 1430, amid the brutal and grinding wars that had ravaged France for nearly a century, the woman who had once turned the tide of battle at Orléans found herself surrounded, outnumbered, and—most damning of all—abandoned. Joan of Arc, the teenage peasant-turned-warrior…
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On May 22, 1804, the boats pushed off from the banks of St. Charles, Missouri, and the United States crossed a threshold. What lay ahead was not merely a geographic expedition but a test of national ambition—a collision of science, sovereignty, and myth. The…
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On May 21, 1856, the town of Lawrence, Kansas—a fledgling stronghold of free-state resistance on the contested frontier—was looted and burned by a posse of some 800 proslavery partisans under the authority of a federal marshal. Though often recast in summary as a mere…
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May 19, 1780 started like any other day. The sun rose, farmers went to work, shopkeepers opened their stores, and people moved about their morning routines. But by late morning, across much of New England and parts of eastern Canada, something strange began to…
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