May 11 in History

Edgar waited fourteen years to have a crown placed on his head. He'd been king since 959, ruling England just fine without the ceremony, but in 973 he decided Bath Abbey would host something new: England's first proper coronation. His wife Ælfthryth got crowned too, making her the first queen consort to receive the honor in her own right. The service they designed that day became the template—every English monarch since has followed Edgar's script. Sometimes the most lasting revolutions happen when someone finally writes down what everyone forgot to formalize.

Louis IX handed over Roussillon, Cerdagne, and all French claims to Barcelona's lands. James I gave back Provence and every Catalan foothold north of the Pyrenees. Both kings were renouncing what their grandfathers had fought wars over, what their fathers had died defending. The treaty took three years to negotiate because neither side could believe the other would actually sign. But they did. In one afternoon at Corbeil, the mountains became a real border instead of just geography. Catalonia stopped being a bridge between kingdoms and became something else entirely: stuck choosing which side it belonged to.

He had a peg leg and a temper to match. Peter Stuyvesant limped off the ship in 1647 to replace Willem Kieft, who'd managed to start a war with every Native tribe within fifty miles of New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant lasted seventeen years as Director-General, longer than any other Dutch leader in the colony. Built a wall on Wall Street. Banned dancing. Tried to keep out Jews and Quakers. And when the British sailed into the harbor in 1664, his own colonists refused to fight for him. They preferred English rule to his.

Marshal de Saxe's French forces defeated an Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian coalition at Fontenoy in a brutal five-hour engagement that cost 14,000 casualties on each side. The victory secured France's hold on the Austrian Netherlands and established Saxe as the era's foremost commander, while the defeated allies struggled to coordinate multinational armies for the remainder of the war.

They'd been walking in circles for decades. The sandstone cliffs west of Sydney rose like fortress walls, trapping colonists to a coastal strip barely sixty miles wide. Blaxland brought sheep-farming ambition, Wentworth brought youth at twenty-three, Lawson brought the critical insight: follow the ridgelines, not the valleys. For nineteen days in May 1813, they walked along the tops while every previous expedition had descended into dead ends. Beyond those blue-hazed ranges lay grazing land that would become wool empires, inland cities, a continental nation. All because someone finally looked up instead of down.

The Blue Mountains had stopped Sydney cold for twenty-five years. Not metaphorically—literally stopped expansion. Three ridges deep, each valley dropping into impenetrable forest that forced climbers back down. Then Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth did something nobody had tried: they followed the ridgelines instead of descending into valleys. Twenty-one days. Four convict servants. Five dogs. They found grasslands. Endless inland plains beyond the ranges. Within three years, settlers were driving sheep across their route. By 1830, tens of thousands had poured through. Sometimes the solution isn't fighting your way through—it's walking on top.

They blew her up themselves. The CSS Virginia—the same warship that had terrorized the Union navy just two months earlier, the beast that made wooden warships obsolete overnight—went to the bottom by her own crew's hand on May 11, 1862. Confederate sailors set charges and watched their ironclad marvel sink into the James River mud rather than let advancing Union forces capture her. She drew too much water to escape upriver. Ten weeks of dominance, ended with a fuse and a retreat. Sometimes your greatest weapon becomes your greatest liability.

The future Tsar of Russia nearly died in a Japanese rickshaw town, his skull opened by a policeman's sword. Tsuda Sanzō got two strikes in before Prince George of Greece—there as his travel companion—clubbed the attacker with a bamboo cane. Nicholas survived with a five-inch scar he'd touch for the rest of his life. Japan's emperor personally apologized. The government panicked, terrified Russia would retaliate. But Nicholas bore no grudge against Japan. Thirty-four years later, different enemies would finish what one policeman started in Ōtsu.