History Notes this week of May 30

1431 — Joan of Arc, convicted of heresy by an English-aligned church tribunal, is burned at the stake in Rouen at approximately nineteen years of age. Her rehabilitation trial, initiated twenty-five years later, would annul the verdict. Mark Twain considered his biography of her his finest work.

1637 — Birth of Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit missionary and explorer who would later, with Louis Jolliet, become one of the first Europeans to map the upper Mississippi River, paddling its course in 1673.

1672 — Birth of Peter the Great, who would transform Russia from a landlocked, medieval tsardom into a modernized empire with a Baltic coastline, a navy, and a freshly built capital city named after himself.

1740 — Birth of the Marquis de Sade, French nobleman and writer whose imprisonment under multiple regimes — including the Bastille, into which he shouted provocations at the street crowds below — became nearly as notorious as his literary output.

1738 — Birth in London of George, who would ascend the British throne as George III and preside over both the loss of the American colonies and the long wars against Napoleonic France, before retreating into permanent madness in his final years.

1763 — During Pontiac’s War, a coalition of Ojibwe warriors stages an elaborate ruse at Fort Michilimackinac, using a lacrosse match as cover to gain entry through the gates. Fifteen of the thirty-five British defenders are killed outright.

1769 — Captain James Cook observes the Transit of Venus from Tahiti, one of dozens of simultaneous scientific expeditions mounted around the globe. The parallax measurements gathered that day allowed astronomers to calculate the distance from Earth to the Sun with reasonable precision for the first time.

1779 — Colonel Benedict Arnold is court-martialed on corruption charges in Philadelphia. Though he receives only a mild reprimand from Washington, the public humiliation deepens his grievances and accelerates his turn toward treason within the following year.

1805 — John and Abigail Adams become the first occupants of the new Executive Mansion in Washington, moving in while plaster was still damp and firewood was being burned in every room to dry out the walls.

1808 — Birth of Jefferson Davis, future President of the Confederate States of America. His postwar years were spent in relative dignity, writing his memoirs and declining to seek a pardon that would have required him to admit wrongdoing.

1813 — HMS Shannon defeats USS Chesapeake in a brief but savage engagement off Boston Harbor. The battle lasts under fifteen minutes and costs Captain James Lawrence his life, but his dying words — “Don’t give up the ship” — are immediately adopted as a rallying cry for the young American navy.

1819 — Birth of Walt Whitman, whose self-published collection Leaves of Grass (1855) would upend American poetry by abandoning rhyme and meter in favor of sprawling, sensory, democratic verse that celebrated the body, labor, and the open road.

1846 — Birth of Peter Carl Fabergé, the Russian goldsmith whose workshop produced a series of elaborately jeweled Easter eggs for the Romanov imperial family beginning in 1885. Fifty of the fifty-two imperial eggs are known to survive.

1854 — The Kansas-Nebraska Act passes Congress, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise by allowing the residents of new territories to decide the slavery question for themselves. The resulting chaos in Kansas — elections manipulated, towns burned, men murdered — proved that the compromise satisfied almost no one.

1864 — First day of the Battle of Cold Harbor, Virginia. Over the following week, Union General Grant orders repeated frontal assaults against heavily fortified Confederate positions, ultimately suffering over twelve thousand casualties for no appreciable gain — losses he would later describe as his deepest regret of the war.

1878 — Birth of Barney Oldfield, who in 1903 drove Henry Ford’s “999” racing car to become the first person to travel one mile in under a minute, launching a career that made him the most famous racing driver in America for the next two decades.

1886 — President Grover Cleveland marries Frances Folsom in the Blue Room of the White House, the only presidential wedding held there. At twenty-one, she remains the youngest First Lady in American history.

1888 — The San Francisco Examiner publishes “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer, a comic ballad about a slugger’s humiliating strikeout that was initially overlooked until the actor DeWolf Hopper recited it on stage and turned it into an American institution.

1889 — The Johnstown Flood claims over 2,200 lives in central Pennsylvania after the privately owned South Fork Dam gives way following days of heavy rain. The dam had been purchased and improperly maintained by a private hunting and fishing club whose wealthy members faced essentially no legal consequences.

1902 — The Peace of Vereeniging ends the Boer War, in which Britain employed concentration camps to intern Boer civilian families — a strategy that killed tens of thousands through disease and malnutrition and drew international condemnation, foreshadowing the term’s darker twentieth-century associations.

1907 — Birth of Rosalind Russell, the sharp-edged comedic actress best remembered for her rapid-fire performance in His Girl Friday (1940), who also received Academy Award nominations for dramatic work in My Sister Eileen, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Auntie Mame.

1911 — Roy Harroun wins the inaugural Indianapolis 500 at an average speed of 74.6 mph, driving a car he had fitted with a rear-view mirror — possibly its first use on a racing vehicle — to compensate for the absence of a riding mechanic.

1913 — A peace treaty ends the First Balkan War, but the redrawing of territory in southeastern Europe only intensifies the competition among the great powers. Within a year, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo would ignite the catastrophe those rivalries had been building toward.

1914 — Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels bans alcohol from all naval vessels and installations, substituting it with mass-produced coffee. The move angered sailors enough that “a cup of Joe” entered the language as an expression of contempt for the policy — though the etymology remains disputed among scholars.

1916 — The Battle of Jutland, the largest naval engagement of the First World War, is joined in the North Sea between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet. Though Germany sinks more British tonnage, the strategic outcome favors Britain: the German fleet never again ventures out in force, and Germany turns instead to unrestricted submarine warfare.

1940 — The Allied evacuation from Dunkirk is completed, having extracted over 338,000 British and French troops from the beaches using a fleet of naval vessels and civilian craft. That same day, the Luftwaffe begins its first bombing raids on Paris.

1941 — Death of Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees first baseman whose consecutive-games record of 2,130 stood for fifty-six years. His 1939 farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, in which he called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” remains one of the most moving addresses in sports history.

1942 — The Battle of Midway begins, culminating in the destruction of four Japanese fleet carriers — Kaga, Akagi, Sōryū, and Hiryū — and the deaths of many of Japan’s most experienced naval aviators. The battle is widely regarded as the decisive turning point of the Pacific War.

1944 — The USS Guadalcanal and her hunter-killer group capture the German submarine U-505 in the Atlantic, the first seizure of an enemy warship on the high seas by the United States Navy since the War of 1812. The Enigma materials and codebooks recovered aboard proved immediately useful to Allied codebreakers.

1953 — Elizabeth II is crowned at Westminster Abbey in a ceremony broadcast on television for the first time, drawing an audience of millions across Britain and the Commonwealth. She would reign for seventy years, the longest of any British monarch.

1965 — Gemini 4 launches, carrying astronaut Ed White, who performs America’s first spacewalk — twenty-three minutes outside the capsule — and has to be ordered back inside by Mission Control because he is enjoying himself too much to come in.

1966 — NASA’s Surveyor 1 makes a controlled soft landing on the Moon, transmitting over ten thousand surface images and demonstrating that the lunar soil could support the weight of a crewed lander — a question that had concerned engineers planning the Apollo program.

1967 — King Hussein of Jordan and Egyptian President Nasser sign a joint defense pact as Arab military pressure on Israel’s borders intensifies. Six days later, Israel launches preemptive airstrikes that destroy the Egyptian air force on the ground and begin the Six-Day War.

1980 — Pope John Paul II becomes the first pontiff to visit France since Napoleon held Pius VII there as a virtual captive in 1804. His outdoor Mass at Le Bourget draws over three hundred thousand people.

1986 — The Chinese government orders the People’s Liberation Army to clear Tiananmen Square by force, ending six weeks of pro-democracy demonstrations with thousands of deaths. The solitary man who stepped in front of a column of tanks the following morning became one of the most recognized images of the twentieth century; his identity has never been established.

2008 — Death of Bo Diddley, the pioneering rock and roll guitarist whose syncopated “Bo Diddley beat” — a variant of the African clave rhythm — was borrowed by the Rolling Stones, Buddy Holly, Bruce Springsteen, and countless others, making it one of the most pervasive rhythmic patterns in popular music.

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Wayne Creed

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