May 24 in History

They caught him hunting when the messengers arrived. Henry the Fowler was setting bird traps in the Harz Mountains—literally fowling—when Saxon nobles found him to offer the crown of East Francia. He didn't rush back. Finished his hunt first. At Fritzlar in 919, he refused the traditional anointing by the archbishop, claiming he wasn't worthy. But he took the crown anyway. First German king who wasn't a Carolingian. The Saxon dynasty would last a century, but Henry's real trick was this: he convinced everyone a commoner hunting birds was exactly what a fractured kingdom needed.

They dressed a ten-year-old baker's son in royal robes and called him Edward VI. Lambert Simnel had probably never held a sword before May 24, 1487, when Irish lords crowned him king in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. The boy couldn't have understood he was a pawn in the Earl of Lincoln's scheme to unseat Henry VII—a fake prince with a real crown. The rebellion lasted three months. Henry won at Stoke Field and did something stranger than execution: he gave Lambert a job in the royal kitchens. The pretender king spent forty years turning spits where he once wore a crown.

Louis XIV's lawyers found a loophole in medieval inheritance law that would make any corporate attorney proud. The Spanish Netherlands should belong to his wife, they argued, because daughters from a first marriage "devolved" property ahead of sons from a second. Never mind that Marie-Thérèse had renounced all claims when she married him. On May 24, 1667, 50,000 French troops marched across the border to collect what Louis called his wife's dowry. Spain called it an invasion. Both were right. The war lasted eighteen months and grabbed a dozen fortified cities. Lawyers have justified worse land grabs with flimsier precedents.

The law that freed Protestant dissenters to worship openly kept one hand around the throat of England's Catholics. Parliament's Act of Toleration in 1689 let Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers finally build churches without fear of prison—but if you attended Mass, you still couldn't vote, hold office, or own land. William III signed it weeks after taking the throne from Catholic James II. Freedom for some. Exclusion for others. And here's the thing: those anti-Catholic restrictions stayed on the books for another 140 years.

His heart felt "strangely warmed." That's how John Wesley described it—at 8:45 p.m., in a meeting room on Aldersgate Street, listening to someone read Luther's preface to Romans. Wesley had been a missionary. An Anglican priest. A failure in Georgia who'd sailed home defeated. But this moment, this odd sensation in his chest, launched something he couldn't control. Within fifty years, 70,000 Methodists in Britain alone. All because a man admitted his heart had been cold until one Wednesday evening when it wasn't anymore.

The twenty-nine-year-old Venezuelan had already failed once to free his homeland—fled to exile just months before. Now he crossed back from New Granada with a ragtag army, offering no quarter to Spanish loyalists in what became known as his "War to the Death" decree. When Bolívar rode into Mérida on May 23, 1813, the town's leaders draped him in the title he'd carry forever: El Libertador. He'd win and lose Venezuela twice more before it stuck. The honorific outlasted the man, the dream, and eventually the unified nation he died trying to hold together.

The horse won. That's what passengers remembered most about America's first paid train ride—how *Stockton & Stokes*, the actual horse pulling a coal car on parallel tracks, beat the steam locomotive for the first thirteen miles between Baltimore and Ellicott's Mills. The B&O's engine kept stopping to build pressure. Twenty-four passengers paid their fare anyway, lurching along at ten miles per hour when the boiler cooperated. By 1835, horses were gone from American railroads entirely. Turns out people will pay for the future even when it loses to the past.

The poem wasn't original. Sarah Josepha Hale took a real story—a girl named Mary Sawyer whose pet lamb actually followed her to school in Sterling, Massachusetts in 1815—and turned it into verse. When she published it in 1830, she gave America its first nursery rhyme written on home soil. The real Mary kept wool from that lamb her entire life. And Hale? She went on to become the most influential magazine editor in America, the woman who convinced Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. All from a lamb.

A Confederate flag flew above the Marshall House hotel in Alexandria, and Colonel Elmer Ellsworth couldn't let it stand. The 24-year-old Union officer climbed the stairs, cut it down himself. The innkeeper, James Jackson, shot him point-blank coming back down. Jackson died seconds later from return fire. First officer killed in the war, over a piece of cloth visible from Washington. Both men's bodies were displayed in their respective capitals, transformed into instant martyrs. The whole war would be like this: personal, close enough to see faces, impossible to forget.

The Orange Free State had been independent for just 48 years when British troops marched in and renamed it the Orange River Colony. Three thousand Boer farmers were already dead. Britain wanted the gold fields of neighboring Transvaal—this annexation was just step two of wiping two republics off the map. The farmers didn't surrender. They kept fighting guerrilla-style for another two years, forcing Britain to invent concentration camps to break them. A nation disappeared on paper while its people refused to disappear in practice.

Her father told her she was too stupid to learn anything. So Amy Johnson bought a second-hand Gypsy Moth biplane for £600, named it Jason, and flew 11,000 miles alone with a revolver and a toothbrush. She crash-landed twice, got lost over Burma, and arrived in Darwin on May 24, 1930 with her plane held together by fabric patches. Nineteen and a half days from England to Australia. The mechanics who met her couldn't believe she'd done her own repairs. She had, because nobody taught her—she'd figured it out herself.