May 31 in History

The Mongols didn't just take Zhongdu—they waited. For a year. Genghis Khan's forces surrounded the Jin capital while its million inhabitants starved inside walls thirty feet thick. Emperor Xuanzong fled south months before the end, leaving his generals to negotiate a surrender that never came. When the gates finally opened in 1215, the city burned for over a month. The Mongols razed everything. Fifty years later, Kublai Khan would build his own capital on the same ground, the city Marco Polo called the greatest he'd ever seen. Same dirt, different empire.

The Rus princes couldn't agree on a battle plan, so they didn't share one. At the Kalka River in 1223, Subutai's Mongol scouts pretended to retreat for nine days straight while the Kievan coalition forces chased them in a disorganized scramble. When the Mongols finally turned around, they cut through 80,000 Rus and Cuman warriors in hours. The captured princes were laid under wooden boards while Mongol commanders ate a victory feast on top, slowly crushing them. Subutai's army then vanished back into the steppe for thirteen years. The next time they returned, they conquered everything.

London's streets gleamed with what investors thought was gold ore. Fifteen hundred tons of it, shipped back by Martin Frobisher from the frozen reaches of Canada in 1578. He'd sailed from Harwich with 15 ships and 400 men, convinced he'd found England's fortune in the rocks around what's now Frobisher Bay. The assayers kept testing. And testing. Iron pyrite. Worthless. The investors were ruined, Frobisher's reputation crumbled, and London literally paved its roads with the stuff. Sometimes the difference between a hero and a fool is just one chemical test.

The oldest bridge in Paris is called the New Bridge. And it's still true. King Henry III dropped the first stone into the Seine in 1578, christening the Pont Neuf—literally "New Bridge"—though it wouldn't open for thirty years. He didn't live to see it finished. But here's what made it strange: Paris's first bridge built without houses crammed along its sides. Just open walkways. Parisians could see their river for once. Today, every older bridge has crumbled or been rebuilt. The New Bridge remains, four centuries later, still the oldest crossing in the city.

They built floating islands on the Thames—artificial landscapes complete with trees, hills, and mythical creatures—all to celebrate a teenager becoming Prince of Wales. London's entire merchant class funded the spectacle: silk banners, fireworks, actors dressed as river gods. Prince Henry loved it. Nine years later he'd be dead from typhoid at eighteen, never wearing the crown. The pageant cost more than some nobles earned in a year, all for a prince who'd never reign. His younger brother Charles inherited everything, including the bad habits that would eventually cost him his head.

The Blue Mountains weren't blue—they were a wall. For twenty-five years, Sydney's colonists stayed trapped on the coast, hemmed in by sandstone cliffs and endless eucalyptus ridges that had turned back every expedition. Then three landowners—Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth—tried something different: they followed the ridgelines instead of the valleys. Twenty-one days later, on May 28, 1813, they stood on Mount Blaxland staring at endless grazing land to the west. Within a decade, Sydney exploded from coastal prison to continental power. They'd just walked over Australia's future.

The bell cracked on its very first test ring. Engineers had cast the largest bell ever made in Britain—13.7 tons of bronze—and it split like cheap pottery when the hammer hit. They patched it, lightened the hammer, and tried again. The crack gave Big Ben its distinctive tone, slightly off-key, which millions would come to recognize as the exact sound of London. The tower itself stood 316 feet tall, its four clock faces each spanning 23 feet across. Every quarter-hour since 1859, precision born from failure.

Grant's Army of the Potomac began probing Lee's entrenched positions at Cold Harbor, opening a twelve-day confrontation that would produce one of the war's most lopsided Union defeats. On June 3, a frontal assault cost 7,000 Union casualties in under an hour, a slaughter Grant later called the only attack he wished he had never ordered.

The railroad heir didn't keep the old showman's name on the building for even a year. William Henry Vanderbilt bought Gilmore's Garden in 1879 and immediately renamed it after the park where it sat—Madison Square, at 26th and Madison Avenue. The arena hosted boxing matches, circuses, and flower shows under its new name. P.T. Barnum staged spectacles there. Stanford White would later design a second version with a tower that dominated the skyline. But the name stuck through four buildings across 145 years, even after the Garden moved miles away from Madison Square itself.

The Boer women and children went first. 28,000 of them dead in British concentration camps—the first time that term entered the English language. Then came the treaty. Britain won the war but had to promise £3 million in reconstruction and eventual self-government to the Afrikaners who'd fought them. Within eight years, those same Boer generals were running South Africa under British sovereignty. They used that power to build apartheid. The camps that killed their families taught them exactly how to control a population.