May 22 in History

Blood ran through the streets of an English market town, and three decades of civil war began. On May 22, 1455, Richard, Duke of York, marched an army to St Albans and attacked King Henry VI's forces in the narrow lanes of the town center, launching the conflict that history would name the Wars of the Roses. The roots were dynastic. Henry VI, a Lancastrian king who suffered bouts of mental incapacity, had alienated powerful nobles through weak governance and the influence of his wife, Margaret of Anjou, and her allies. Richard of York, with a strong claim to the throne through descent from Edward III, had served as Protector during Henry's episodes of insanity but was pushed aside once the king recovered. The battle lasted barely an hour. York's forces, numbering about 3,000, found the town barricaded and attacked through back gardens and side streets. The fighting was concentrated and vicious. Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, was killed outside the Castle Inn. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Lord Clifford also fell. King Henry himself was wounded by an arrow to the neck and captured. York's victory was complete but politically awkward. He had taken up arms against a crowned and anointed king, an act that demanded justification far beyond personal grievance. The immediate result was a brief Yorkist ascendancy, but the deeper consequence was the normalization of armed conflict between England's greatest noble families. Over the next thirty years, the crown would change hands five times, thousands of English nobles and soldiers would die, and the conflict would only end when Henry Tudor destroyed Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485, founding the dynasty that produced Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

Nearly a thousand people bet their lives on a rumor that Oregon's Willamette Valley had the best farmland on the continent. On May 22, 1843, approximately 875 emigrants gathered in Independence, Missouri, with 120 wagons and 5,000 head of cattle, and pointed west on a 2,000-mile journey that would take five months and redefine the American frontier. The Great Migration of 1843 was not the first wagon train to Oregon, but it was the first large enough to matter politically. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman had crossed with a small missionary party in 1836, and smaller groups had made the trip since. What made 1843 different was scale: families with children, livestock, furniture, and the full infrastructure of community settlement. The trail ran from Missouri through Kansas, along the Platte River in Nebraska, over the Continental Divide at South Pass in Wyoming, and then northwest through the Snake River plain to the Columbia River. Cholera, river crossings, and exhaustion killed roughly one in ten emigrants on the Oregon Trail over its years of use. The 1843 party lost fewer, partly through luck and partly through the guidance of mountain man Marcus Whitman, who rejoined the train at Fort Hall. The political impact was immediate. Britain and the United States both claimed the Oregon Country, and the question of sovereignty depended partly on which nation's settlers actually occupied the land. The 1843 migration tipped the balance decisively. By 1845, American settlers in Oregon outnumbered British subjects, and the Oregon Treaty of 1846 drew the border at the 49th parallel. Over the next two decades, roughly 400,000 people would travel the Oregon Trail, the largest voluntary overland migration in human history.

Four hundred million dollars bought America a foreign policy doctrine that lasted forty years. On May 22, 1947, President Harry Truman signed the Greek-Turkish Aid Act, committing the United States to supporting governments resisting communist insurgency or Soviet pressure. The principle behind the money would become known as the Truman Doctrine, and it redefined America's role in the world. Greece was in civil war. Communist guerrillas, supplied through Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, were fighting the royalist government for control of the country. Turkey faced Soviet demands for shared control of the Dardanelles, the strait connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Britain, which had traditionally guaranteed stability in both regions, informed Washington in February 1947 that it could no longer afford the commitment. Truman went to Congress on March 12, 1947, and made the case in sweeping terms. "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures," he declared. The speech reframed the Soviet challenge as a global ideological contest rather than a traditional great-power rivalry. Congress approved the aid package within weeks. American military advisors flowed into Greece, and the communist insurgency collapsed by 1949. Turkey received economic and military modernization that anchored it firmly in the Western alliance. The larger consequence was structural. The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to active global containment of communism, a stance that led directly to NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and four decades of Cold War confrontation. Truman's $400 million request opened a door that no subsequent president found a way to close until the Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991.

Sixteen nations showed up to play a sport that only half of them truly understood. On May 22, 1987, New Zealand defeated Italy 70-6 in the opening match of the inaugural Rugby World Cup at Eden Park in Auckland, and the sport's transformation from gentlemen's amateur pastime to global professional spectacle began. Rugby union had resisted organized international competition for over a century. The Home Nations Championship (later the Five and then Six Nations) existed, but the idea of a World Cup was anathema to the sport's amateur establishment. Australia and New Zealand pushed the concept through the International Rugby Football Board over fierce opposition from England and the other British unions, who feared professionalism would follow. The tournament format was straightforward: 16 teams in four pools, knockout rounds, and a final. New Zealand hosted alongside Australia. The quality gap was enormous. New Zealand demolished their pool opponents, and the All Blacks met France in the final at Eden Park on June 20. New Zealand won 29-9, with tries from David Kirk, Michael Jones, and John Kirwan, and the Webb Ellis Cup was theirs. The tournament drew modest television audiences by soccer's standards but proved the commercial viability of international rugby. Sponsorship revenue exceeded expectations, and the success of the event began the slow, inevitable march toward professionalism that arrived officially in 1995. Rugby World Cup has since grown into the third-largest sporting event in the world by viewership, behind only the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics. The amateur ethos that resisted it for a century is now ancient history.

Pizza inspired a revolution in entertainment. Game designer Toru Iwatani looked at a pie with one slice missing and saw a character. On May 22, 1980, Namco released Pac-Man in Japanese arcades, and within months, the yellow disc chomping dots through a neon maze had become the most recognizable video game character on the planet. Iwatani designed Pac-Man specifically to attract women and couples to arcades, which were dominated by space shooters and male teenagers. The concept was radical: no weapons, no enemies to destroy, just a character eating. The four ghosts had distinct personalities and movement patterns, giving the game a depth that rewarded repeat play. Blinky chased directly, Pinky tried to ambush, Inky was unpredictable, and Clyde wandered aimlessly. The game crossed the Pacific and detonated in American arcades. By 1982, Americans had spent an estimated $8 billion in quarters on Pac-Man, more than the combined gross of that year's entire movie industry and all Las Vegas casinos. The game generated over 30 licensed products, a top-ten pop single ("Pac-Man Fever" by Buckner and Garcia), and a Saturday morning cartoon. Pac-Man fundamentally changed who played video games and what those games looked like. Before Pac-Man, the arcade industry was built on reflexes and destruction. After Pac-Man, character and personality became design priorities. The game also proved that video games could cross into mainstream culture as merchandise, music, and media properties. Forty-plus years later, Pac-Man remains the highest-grossing arcade game ever made, with more than $14 billion in lifetime revenue adjusted for inflation.

Constantine the Great died on May 22, 337 AD, at Nicomedia (modern Izmit, Turkey), shortly after being baptized on his deathbed by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia. He was approximately 65 years old. He had ruled the Roman Empire for 31 years, longer than any emperor since Augustus, and had transformed both the empire and Christianity in ways that neither would recover from. Born around 272 AD in Naissus (modern Nis, Serbia), Constantine was the son of Constantius Chlorus, a Roman military commander who became co-emperor under Diocletian's tetrarchy, and Helena, a woman of humble birth who later became a saint. He was raised partly as a political hostage at Diocletian's court in the east. After his father's death at York in 306, he spent eighteen years fighting a series of civil wars against rival emperors. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, where he defeated Maxentius outside Rome, was the decisive engagement. Before the battle, he reportedly saw a vision of a cross in the sky with the words "In this sign, conquer." He adopted the Chi-Rho symbol, the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek, as his military standard. The Edict of Milan in 313, issued jointly with his co-emperor Licinius, granted legal toleration to all religions in the empire, ending three centuries of intermittent persecution of Christians. Constantine went further than toleration: he funded church construction, granted clergy exemption from taxes and civic duties, and intervened directly in theological disputes. He convened the Council of Nicaea in 325, the first ecumenical council, to resolve the Arian controversy over the nature of Christ. The Nicene Creed that emerged remains the foundational statement of Christian orthodoxy. He moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium, which he rebuilt and renamed Constantinople. The new capital became the seat of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire for over a thousand years, outlasting the Western Empire by nearly a millennium. Whether his conversion was sincere or politically calculated has been debated for seventeen centuries. The empire he reshaped lasted in one form or another until 1453.