May 20 in History

Thomas Thorpe registered a quarto volume at the Stationers' Company in London on May 20, 1609, bearing the title "SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Never before Imprinted." The 154 poems within constitute one of the most analyzed, debated, and admired collections in the English language. Their publication also remains one of literary history's great mysteries, beginning with the dedication to "Mr. W.H.," whose identity scholars have argued about for four centuries without reaching consensus. The sonnets were likely written over a period of several years in the 1590s, when Shakespeare was establishing himself as London's foremost playwright. They address three principal figures: a beautiful young man urged to marry and produce heirs, a "dark lady" with whom the poet has a passionate and tormented affair, and a rival poet competing for the young man's patronage. Whether these figures were real people or literary constructions has generated an enormous scholarly industry. The poems' emotional range is extraordinary. Sonnets 1 through 17 plead with the young man to have children. Sonnets 18 through 126 explore love, jealousy, time, beauty, and mortality with an intensity that has led many readers to conclude Shakespeare was writing from personal experience. Sonnets 127 through 154, addressed to or about the dark lady, are rawer and more sexually explicit, describing desire, disgust, and self-loathing with unflinching candor. The circumstances of publication suggest Shakespeare did not authorize the printing. Unlike his narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which he personally shepherded to press, the sonnets appeared without a dedication from the author. The sequence may have circulated in manuscript among a private audience for years before Thorpe obtained and published it. Shakespeare never commented on the publication. The poems' personal nature, combined with their obvious artistic mastery, has made them the most intimate window into the mind of history's greatest writer.

Two research teams on opposite sides of the Atlantic independently isolated the virus responsible for AIDS on May 20, 1983, triggering a scientific priority dispute that took years and diplomatic intervention to resolve. Luc Montagnier's group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris had identified a retrovirus they called LAV from the lymph node of a patient with early symptoms. Robert Gallo's team at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda was pursuing a similar line of research and would announce their own discovery the following year. The AIDS epidemic had emerged with terrifying speed. The CDC first reported unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma among gay men in Los Angeles and New York in June 1981. Within two years, cases had been identified among hemophiliacs, intravenous drug users, Haitian immigrants, and recipients of blood transfusions. The disease had no treatment, no vaccine, and a fatality rate approaching 100 percent. By the time the virus was identified, thousands of Americans were already infected. The dispute between Montagnier and Gallo over credit for the discovery became one of science's most bitter controversies. Gallo's lab had received a sample of Montagnier's LAV virus for research purposes, and questions arose about whether Gallo's virus, which he called HTLV-III, was actually derived from the French sample. The controversy was resolved in 1987 when Presidents Reagan and Mitterrand brokered an agreement crediting both teams as co-discoverers. The virus was renamed HIV. The identification of HIV made diagnostic testing possible, which in turn revealed the true scale of the pandemic. By the late 1980s, millions worldwide were infected. The development of antiretroviral therapy in the mid-1990s transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition for those with access to treatment. But the virus has killed over 40 million people since the epidemic began, and roughly 39 million people are living with HIV today. The scientific breakthrough of 1983 saved countless lives but came too late for the generation that bore the epidemic's first and heaviest toll.

Vasco da Gama anchored off the coast of Calicut on May 20, 1498, completing a ten-month voyage from Lisbon that connected Europe to Asia by sea for the first time. The Portuguese navigator had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Indian Ocean with the help of an Arab pilot, and arrived at one of the world's richest trading ports. The merchants of Calicut, accustomed to dealing with sophisticated Arab, Chinese, and Southeast Asian traders, were unimpressed by the goods da Gama had brought. The Portuguese had offered cloth, coral, sugar, and honey, trade goods appropriate for West African commerce but laughably inadequate for the Indian market. The Zamorin of Calicut, the city's ruler, reportedly laughed when shown the Portuguese merchandise. Arab merchants who dominated Indian Ocean trade recognized the Portuguese as competitors and worked to undermine their negotiations. Da Gama managed to acquire small quantities of pepper, cinnamon, and precious stones, but the commercial results of the first voyage were modest. What da Gama accomplished was not commercial but strategic. He had proven that a sea route to India existed and that Portuguese ships could navigate it. This knowledge was worth more than any cargo hold of spices. The overland spice trade, controlled by Arab middlemen and Venetian merchants, generated enormous profits at every transfer point. Direct sea access to Indian markets promised to eliminate every intermediary and funnel the profits to Lisbon. Portugal moved quickly to exploit the route. Pedro Alvares Cabral led a follow-up fleet in 1500, and within a decade, Portuguese warships were establishing fortified trading posts across the Indian Ocean. Goa, Malacca, and Hormuz fell under Portuguese control. The Venetian spice monopoly collapsed. The global economy was fundamentally restructured, as European naval power projected itself into waters that had been dominated by Asian and Arab traders for centuries. Da Gama's voyage did not just discover a route; it inaugurated five centuries of European commercial and military dominance in Asia.

Jacob Davis, a Latvian-born tailor working in Reno, Nevada, came up with the idea of using copper rivets to reinforce the stress points on work pants after a customer's wife complained that her husband kept tearing through his trousers. Davis placed rivets at the pocket corners and the base of the fly, creating pants durable enough for miners, laborers, and ranchers. On May 20, 1873, Davis and his fabric supplier, San Francisco wholesaler Levi Strauss, received US Patent No. 139,121 for the process of riveting clothing. Davis had been buying his denim and duck cloth from Levi Strauss & Co. for years. When he realized the riveted pants were selling as fast as he could make them, he wanted to patent the idea but lacked the $68 filing fee. He wrote to Strauss proposing a partnership: Davis would contribute the invention, Strauss would fund the patent and handle manufacturing at scale. Strauss recognized the opportunity immediately and agreed. The original riveted pants were made from two fabrics: brown cotton duck and blue denim. The denim version, dyed with indigo, proved more popular with workers and eventually became the standard. The pants were sold as "waist overalls" and marketed to laborers in the American West. They were tough, affordable, and designed for physical work. The copper rivets, the key innovation, prevented seams from tearing under the strain of loading ore, bending fence wire, or climbing scaffolding. Blue jeans remained workwear for roughly eighty years. Hollywood westerns in the 1930s and 1940s began associating denim with rugged American individualism. Marlon Brando and James Dean made jeans symbols of youthful rebellion in the 1950s. By the 1960s, jeans had crossed every social boundary, worn by factory workers, college students, rock musicians, and eventually fashion designers who charged hundreds of dollars for artificially distressed versions of a garment originally built to resist destruction. The riveted pocket patent expired in 1891, but the brand Davis and Strauss created remains one of the most recognized in the world.

Robin Gibb died of cancer on May 20, 2012, at sixty-two, silencing one-third of the vocal harmony that powered the Bee Gees' five-decade run of global hits. Born on the Isle of Man on December 22, 1949, he was three minutes older than his twin brother Maurice. The family moved to Manchester and then to Brisbane, Australia, where the three Gibb brothers, Barry, Robin, and Maurice, began performing as children, singing between movie screenings at local cinemas. They returned to England in 1967 and signed with Robert Stigwood's management, producing the baroque pop hit "Massachusetts" that reached number one in the UK. Their sound evolved from orchestral pop through psychedelia before the Brothers Gibb transformation of 1975, when they reinvented themselves as disco's premier act. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, released in 1977, sold over forty million copies worldwide and produced four number-one singles: "How Deep Is Your Love," "Stayin' Alive," "Night Fever," and "More Than a Woman." The album defined the disco era and made the falsetto harmonies of the Gibb brothers the most recognizable vocal sound in popular music. Robin's tremulous tenor provided the emotional weight that balanced Barry's soaring falsetto. Beyond their own recordings, the brothers wrote and produced hits for other artists, including "Emotion" for Samantha Sang, "Woman in Love" for Barbra Streisand, and "Islands in the Stream" for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. Maurice died in 2003, and Robin's death left Barry as the sole surviving brother. The Bee Gees sold over 220 million records worldwide.