Category: Today

On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.

• The Roundheads defeated the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War on June 1, 1648.
• The court-martial for malfeasance of Benedict Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, began on this date in 1779.
• Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the United States in 1792 on the same day of the month.
• Tennessee was admitted as the 16th state of the United States exactly four years later.
• Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey declared the Territory of Minnesota officially established — 1849.
• The Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed, allowing the Navajo to return to their lands in Arizona and New Mexico, in 1868.
• The United States Census Bureau began using, on June 1, 1890, Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine to count census returns.
• Adolf Eichmann, a former SS officer in Nazi Germany, was hanged on June 1, 1962, in Israel . . . for having committed crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other offenses.
• The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims was first published in the June 1, 1974, issue of Emergency Medicine.
• George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty to end chemical weapon production in 1990, on the first day of June.

On May 31, A.D. 455, Emperor Petronius Maximus was stoned to death by an angry mob while fleeing Rome from a Vandal invasion that was, in fact, blowback from his own power politics. Thus ended his two-and-a-half month reign, which he had obtained by murder and bribery.

Petronius Maximus made at least one strategic mistake, attempting to strengthen his position by forcing Licinia Eudoxia, the previous emperor’s widow, to marry him — and forcing her daughter Eudocia to marry his son. This latter arrangement canceled Eudocia’s betrothal to the son of the Vandal king Genseric, infuriating both Eudocia and Genseric, who sent a fleet to Rome. Maximus failed to obtain troops from the Visigoths and he fled as the Vandals arrived. In the hubbub, he became detached from his retinue and bodyguard and was killed by fellow Romans.

In one of the most consequential sieges in western history, Titus Caesar Vespasianus and his Roman legions breached the Second Wall of Jerusalem on May 30 of A.D. 70. Jewish defenders retreated to the First Wall, but were overcome before summer’s end. Titus’s armies crucified thousands and destroyed the historic Second Temple.

Rhode Island and Providence Plantations became the last of North America’s revolutionary thirteen colonies to ratify the United States Constitution, on May 29, 1790. This was following its other claim to fame, being the first colony of British North America to declare its independence, which it did on May 4, 1776.

After two months of vigorous revolutionary acts — from “social democratic” reforms to public executions — the Paris Commune fell on May 28, 1871.

The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously declared key portions of the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional, in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (295 U.S. 495), on May 27, 1935.

And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not pleased in the slightest.

Capitalism’s 26th of May milestones:

• On May 26, 1896, Charles Dow publishes the first edition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
• The last Model T rolled off of Ford Motor Company’s assembly line on May 26th of 1927, after a production run of 15,007,003 vehicles.
• The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on the 26th of May, 1967.

On May 25, 1878, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore opened at the Opera Comique in London.

Image is a detail from an 1879 theater poster.

In America and in most of the world, Gilbert and Sullivan’s works are considered operettas, but in Britain they are usually referred to as “Savoy operas” or “comic operas.” Another term is “light opera.”

On the 25th of May in 1895, playwright, poet and novelist Oscar Wilde was convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons” and sentenced to serve two years in prison — becoming history’s most famous prosecutions for homosexual activity. It is perhaps worth noting that had Wilde not himself sued the Marquess of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas, for criminal libel, and had not the Marquess demonstrated the truth of his offensive-to-Wilde statement, the prosecution would never have even commenced, and he would never have been sent to Reading Gaol.

The statement in question was Douglas’s note on a calling card: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic].”

Five years after Wilde’s death in 1900, his Salomé was adapted as an opera, music composed by Richard Strauss. It was most definitely not any form of light opera.

In 1895 on May 25, the Republic of Formosa was formed, with Tang Jingsong as its president. It lasted less than half a year, dissolving upon conquest by Japan.