May 19 in History

The toilet didn't work. That's what nearly killed the space station before STS-101 ever left the pad. Atlantis hauled up a replacement toilet, new batteries, and enough spare parts to keep the ISS breathing for another year. Mission Commander James Halsell and his crew spent a week installing what amounted to cosmic duct tape—because the most expensive construction project in human history, orbiting at 17,500 mph, was one bathroom failure away from evacuation. They fixed it. The station's been continuously occupied ever since. Twenty-four years and counting.

The signatures happened on a Sunday in May, 2,300 miles apart. Catherine stood before lawyers in a Spanish church while a proxy held Arthur's portrait. Arthur did the same in England. Neither child spoke the same language. Neither had met. Their fathers—Ferdinand and Henry VII—had been negotiating this deal for eleven years, since Catherine was two years old. The marriage would bind Spain and England against France. It lasted exactly 143 days. Arthur died of sweating sickness in 1482, leaving Catherine in diplomatic limbo for seven years until she married his younger brother Henry. That went differently.

The two young men sailing back across the Atlantic had spent a year in France — kidnapped, dressed in European clothes, taught French, paraded before King Francis I as proof of Cartier's discoveries. Now Domagaya and Taignoagny were returning home to their father, Chief Donnacona, aboard three ships with 110 Frenchmen who planned to establish a permanent colony. The brothers would arrive speaking a new language, wearing strange clothes, knowing exactly what these visitors wanted. They'd spend the next year trying to protect their people from the man who'd abducted them.

They kept the same building. Parliament met in the same Westminster chambers where they'd bowed to kings for centuries, but now they called England a "Commonwealth" and no one wore a crown. May 19, 1649. The Long Parliament—already sitting for nine years, already fought a civil war, already cut off the king's head four months earlier—finally made it official on paper. For eleven years England would have no monarch. Then Charles II came back, and the men who signed this act started dying on scaffolds. Regicide has consequences.

Half a million acres of American wilderness, and the British king just handed it to a bunch of Virginia businessmen who'd never seen it. The Ohio Company got their charter in 1749 for land at the forks of the Ohio River—land the French considered theirs, land the Iroquois actually lived on. Nobody asked either. The company's job was to settle a hundred families and build a fort. Instead, they triggered a war. Five years later, a young surveyor named George Washington would march into those same forks carrying orders that started the French and Indian War. Real estate deals have consequences.

At noon, chickens went to roost. Candles were lit in Boston homes at midday, and people in Connecticut couldn't read newspapers held at arm's length. The darkness came on so thick that some believed Judgment Day had arrived—legislators in Hartford debated whether to adjourn, while others insisted on bringing more candles and continuing their work. The culprit was likely massive forest fires in Canada, their smoke creating an atmospheric lens that swallowed the sun. But for one afternoon in 1780, New Englanders genuinely didn't know if the world was ending or just changing.

Chickens went to roost at noon. That's what witnesses reported on May 19, 1780, when New England went dark as midnight at 10:30 in the morning. Candles were lit for lunch. The Connecticut legislature stopped mid-session, convinced the apocalypse had arrived. But one colonel demanded they keep working: "I am for candles," he said, because if it's Judgment Day, he wanted to be found doing his duty. The cause? Forest fires hundreds of miles away, their smoke mixing with fog. The fear it created, though—that stuck around longer than the darkness itself.

The tariff raised import duties to nearly 50 percent—the highest peacetime rate in American history. John Quincy Adams knew what he was signing. Northern manufacturers would thrive. Southern cotton growers, who bought most of their finished goods from abroad, would pay through the nose. They called it the Tariff of Abominations within weeks. Four years later, South Carolina threatened to nullify federal law over it. Some historians mark this as the moment when Civil War became inevitable. Adams protected New England's mills and broke the Union's back.