May 2 in History

Two French fur traders convinced the English crown to claim a territory larger than Western Europe, and the document that made it happen fit on a single sheet of parchment. On May 2, 1670, King Charles II granted the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay a royal charter that gave them exclusive trading rights over the entire watershed draining into Hudson Bay. The territory covered 1.5 million square miles, roughly a third of modern Canada. Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Medard Chouart des Groseilliers had explored the region and recognized that the richest beaver-trapping grounds lay north of the Great Lakes, accessible by ship through Hudson Bay rather than by the arduous canoe routes from Montreal. When French authorities seized their furs and fined them for trading without a license, the two men took their knowledge to England, where Prince Rupert, the king's cousin, organized a syndicate of investors. The charter named eighteen shareholders, granted them a commercial monopoly, the right to make laws, build forts, raise armies, and wage war against non-Christian peoples. The Company's territory, called Rupert's Land, encompassed all lands draining into Hudson Bay and its tributaries, though no European had mapped most of it. Indigenous nations who had inhabited these lands for millennia were not consulted. For two centuries, the Hudson's Bay Company operated as a de facto government across northern North America, establishing a network of trading posts where Indigenous trappers exchanged beaver pelts for manufactured goods. The "Made Beaver" became the standard unit of currency, and the Company's policies shaped relations between European settlers and Indigenous peoples across the continent. In 1870, the Company surrendered Rupert's Land to the new Dominion of Canada for 300,000 pounds. The HBC still operates as a retail company, making it one of the oldest commercial enterprises on Earth.

General Mills shipped six cases of a new cereal to test markets in May 1941, and the product inside the boxes looked like nothing on grocery shelves. CheeriOats, as the company called it, was the first ready-to-eat oat cereal, shaped into small toroidal rings by a puffing gun that shot dough through a die at high pressure. Within a decade, it would become the best-selling cereal in America. The development team, led by Lester Borchardt, spent years solving the technical challenge of making oat flour behave in a puffing process designed for wheat and rice. Oats contain more fat than other grains, which made them sticky and difficult to extrude. Borchardt's breakthrough involved cooking the oat flour under precise steam pressure before shaping it, a process General Mills patented. The cereal launched with health messaging that was aggressive even by 1940s standards. Advertisements promoted CheeriOats as a source of energy and vitality, leaning into wartime nutrition concerns. General Mills distributed samples to military bases, and the cereal became a staple of mess halls during World War II, introducing it to millions of young servicemen who brought the habit home. Quaker Oats sued in 1945, arguing that the name "CheeriOats" infringed on their trademark by implying a connection to their oat products. General Mills settled by renaming the cereal "Cheerios," a change that proved to be a marketing gift. The shorter, friendlier name was easier for children to say and remember. Cheerios became the top-selling cereal brand in the United States by 1951 and has held that position for most of the decades since. The original plain variety remains its best seller, and the brand's association with heart health, formalized in a 1999 FDA-approved label claim about oat fiber and cholesterol reduction, transformed a breakfast food into something closer to a daily health ritual for millions of Americans.

Soviet soldiers raised the red banner over the Reichstag's shattered dome on April 30, but the fighting in Berlin's streets continued for two more days. On May 2, 1945, General Helmuth Weidling, the last commandant of the Berlin Defense Area, surrendered the city's garrison to Soviet forces, ending a battle that had killed an estimated 125,000 civilians and reduced Germany's capital to rubble. The Berlin Strategic Offensive began on April 16, when 2.5 million Soviet troops, supported by 6,250 tanks, launched their assault across the Oder and Neisse rivers. Marshal Georgy Zhukov attacked from the east while Marshal Ivan Konev swept from the south, and the two pincers closed around the city within a week. Hitler, confined to his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, refused to authorize retreat or evacuation. Street-by-street urban combat turned Berlin into a slaughterhouse. Soviet forces used massed artillery at point-blank range, reducing buildings to rubble before infantry advanced. German defenders included Volkssturm militia units composed of old men and teenage boys fighting with Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons. Soviet casualties exceeded 80,000 killed in the final two weeks. Hitler shot himself on April 30, leaving Grand Admiral Karl Donitz as his successor. Weidling's surrender order the following day directed all remaining German forces in Berlin to cease fighting, though pockets of resistance continued for hours. Soviet troops discovered Hitler's partially burned remains in the Chancellery garden. The fall of Berlin effectively ended the war in Europe, though the formal German surrender would follow on May 7 at Reims and May 8 in Berlin. The city was divided into four occupation sectors, a partition that hardened into the Cold War's most visible fault line and lasted until 1990.

A Portuguese Jesuit with a papal title and imperial ambitions stepped ashore at the Red Sea port of Beilul in May 1625, carrying instructions from Rome to bring the Ethiopian Orthodox Church under Catholic authority. Afonso Mendes, appointed Latin Patriarch of Ethiopia by Pope Gregory XV, arrived from Goa to take charge of a Jesuit mission that had been working to convert the Ethiopian court for decades. The Jesuits had gained a foothold in Ethiopia through Pedro Paez, a remarkably gifted Spanish priest who won the confidence of Emperor Susenyos and persuaded him to adopt Catholicism in 1622. Paez died that same year, and Rome sent Mendes to formalize the conversion. Where Paez had been diplomatic and willing to accommodate Ethiopian traditions, Mendes was rigid. He insisted on rebaptism, reordination of Ethiopian clergy, and the replacement of ancient Ge'ez liturgical practices with Roman rites. Mendes reached the imperial court in 1626 and immediately began enforcing Roman Catholic doctrine with Susenyos's backing. He prohibited the observance of the Sabbath on Saturday, demanded circumcision be abandoned, and ordered churches rebuilt to face west rather than east. These changes struck at the core of Ethiopian religious identity, which blended Judaic and Christian traditions stretching back to the fourth century. The backlash was violent and sustained. Revolts erupted across the Ethiopian highlands, and thousands died in religious civil wars between 1628 and 1632. Susenyos's own son and heir, Fasilides, sided with the Orthodox establishment. When the death toll became unbearable, Susenyos restored the Orthodox faith and abdicated in 1632. Fasilides expelled the Jesuits from Ethiopia in 1633 and closed the country to European missionaries for over a century. Mendes fled to India, where he died in 1659. The episode left Ethiopia deeply suspicious of Western religious and political influence, a wariness that shaped the kingdom's foreign relations for generations.

Overnight, every civilian GPS receiver on Earth became ten times more accurate, and the modern world quietly rearranged itself around the improvement. On May 1, 2000, President Bill Clinton ordered the Department of Defense to stop intentionally degrading GPS signals available to non-military users, eliminating a program called Selective Availability that had been scrambling civilian readings since the system's inception. Before the change, civilian GPS was accurate to roughly 100 meters. The Pentagon had deliberately introduced timing errors into the satellite signals, ensuring that only military receivers with the correct decryption keys could achieve full precision. The rationale was national security: the Department of Defense had spent $12 billion developing the Global Positioning System and did not want adversaries using American satellites to guide weapons back at American troops. The decision to remove Selective Availability had been building for years. The Federal Aviation Administration needed better accuracy for aircraft navigation. Farmers were adopting GPS-guided tractors. Emergency services wanted reliable location data for 911 calls. Meanwhile, the military had developed other methods to deny GPS to enemies in specific regions without degrading the global signal. Clinton's executive order dropped civilian accuracy from 100 meters to roughly 10 meters immediately. Within months, the commercial GPS industry exploded. Navigation devices, fleet tracking systems, precision agriculture, and surveying tools all became dramatically more useful. The smartphone revolution that followed a few years later depended entirely on reliable civilian GPS. The economic impact dwarfed anything the Pentagon had envisioned. GPS-dependent industries now contribute an estimated $1.4 trillion annually to the American economy. Every ride-sharing app, delivery route, and location-tagged photograph traces back to a presidential order that cost nothing to implement.