May 4 in History

Ken Livingstone won election as London's first directly elected mayor, an office created to give the capital a single accountable leader separate from the ceremonial Lord Mayor. Running as an independent after Labour expelled him, he introduced the congestion charge that reduced central London traffic by 30 percent and became a model for cities worldwide.

The ship carried tulip bulbs, muskets, and a man authorized to buy an island with jewelry. Peter Minuit stepped off the See Meeuw in May 1626 with instructions from the Dutch West India Company: secure the harbor. He traded 60 guilders worth of goods—beads, axes, cloth—with Lenape leaders for Manhattan. They likely thought they were agreeing to shared use. He thought he'd bought real estate. The receipt survives in Amsterdam's archives. Twenty-four dollars, the story goes, though that conversion came two centuries later when Americans needed the deal to sound like a steal.

British forces under General George Harris stormed the fortress of Seringapatam and killed Tipu Sultan, ending the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and eliminating the last major Indian ruler capable of challenging East India Company expansion. The victory gave Britain direct control over Mysore and accelerated colonial consolidation across the Indian subcontinent.

Sixty men, all told. That's what William Walker thought he'd need to conquer an entire country in 1855. The San Francisco lawyer-turned-adventurer sailed for Nicaragua with a ragtag private army, no government backing, and enough audacity to make his mother weep. And it worked. Within a year he'd installed himself as president, legalized slavery, and made English the official language. The U.S. didn't stop him—Cornelius Vanderbilt did, furious that Walker threatened his transit monopoly across the isthmus. Turns out steamship routes beat ideology every time.

Brunel designed the Royal Albert Bridge knowing he'd never walk across it. By 1859, Bright's disease had ravaged him so completely that they carried him across his own bridge on a flat railway truck, lying down, just days before the official opening. The single-track spans—455 feet each—finally connected Cornwall to the rest of England's rail network after decades of geographic isolation. Brunel died four months later, at 53. The Great Western Railway added his name to the bridge portals in letters eight feet tall. Still there.

The Tokugawa fleet sailed into Hakodate Bay with eight warships, convinced their superior gunners would crush the Emperor's new navy. They were wrong. Over four days in May 1869, the Imperial forces sank or captured seven of those eight ships, killing hundreds who'd fought for the shogunate for two hundred fifty years. The survivors surrendered on May 17, ending the Ezo Republic after five months. Japan's last civil war ended not with samurai swords, but with modern naval guns—the old order literally went down with its ships.

The bomb-maker used dynamite wrapped in a metal casing—nobody ever figured out who threw it. Eight Chicago police officers died, but not all from the explosion. Most fell to friendly fire in the chaos that followed, cops shooting cops in the dark and confusion. Four workers died too. The trial afterward convicted eight anarchists, even though the prosecution admitted they couldn't prove who actually built or threw the bomb. Four were hanged. One committed suicide in his cell. And May Day—International Workers' Day—commemorates this massacre every year worldwide, though Americans mostly forgot.

The hookers sailed out that September morning under fair skies—those single-masted fishing boats that could handle Galway Bay's moods better than anything else afloat. Then the wind turned. Eight men went into the water when their vessels capsized in the sudden squall, leaving behind widows who'd waved from shore just hours earlier. The tragedy sparked Ireland's first organized lifeboat fundraising campaign. And here's what sticks: those hookers were designed specifically for these waters, built by families who'd fished them for generations. Sometimes knowing the sea isn't enough.