May 28 in History

Fifteen West African nations signed the Treaty of Lagos, creating the Economic Community of West African States to promote trade integration and collective self-sufficiency. ECOWAS evolved beyond economics to deploy peacekeeping forces in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia, becoming Africa's most active regional security organization.

Li Shimin had 3,500 cavalry. Dou Jiande brought 100,000 men to Hulao Pass in Henan. The numbers didn't matter. Shimin's father had just founded the Tang Dynasty, but half of China wasn't buying it yet. The 22-year-old prince charged anyway, smashing through Dou's center in a single day of fighting. Dou himself got captured. His entire army dissolved. And just like that, the civil war that could've torn China into a dozen kingdoms ended instead with three centuries of Tang rule. Sometimes history turns on one reckless charge by one emperor's son.

They murdered the inquisitors in their sleep. William Arnaud and eleven companions were hunting heretics in Languedoc when Cathars stormed their lodgings at Avignonet on May 28th. Axes and swords. No survivors. Count Raymond VII of Toulouse almost certainly knew it was coming—possibly even gave the nod. The killings bought the Cathars exactly three years. By 1245, the Pope had declared a full crusade against Raymond, and by 1255, organized Catharism was essentially extinct in southern France. Turns out martyring a dozen inquisitors is excellent fuel for the very persecution you're trying to stop.

The supply lists alone took three months to compile: 130 ships needed 300,000 pounds of biscuits, 600,000 pounds of salt pork, and fourteen million gallons of wine. King Philip II's "Invincible Armada" began limping out of Lisbon on May 20, 1588—so many vessels that it took ten days for them all to clear port. Each day's delay meant more spoiled food, more sick sailors, more doubt creeping through the decks. The man commanding this floating city, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, had begged Philip not to give him the job. He got seasick.

Twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington led Virginia militia in a surprise attack on a French reconnaissance party at Jumonville Glen, killing ten soldiers including their commander. The skirmish in the Pennsylvania wilderness ignited the French and Indian War, which expanded into a global conflict between Britain and France that reshaped colonial North America.

Louis Delgrès and his men wrote "Live Free or Die" on their final proclamation to the people of Guadeloupe. Napoleon had sent 15,000 troops to restore slavery across the French Caribbean after briefly abolishing it. The rebels held Mahabou fortress for three weeks against impossible odds. When the walls fell on May 28, 1802, Delgrès detonated the powder magazine. Four hundred chose the explosion. The blast was heard for miles. France got Guadeloupe back. Just not the people who knew its mountains best.

Jackson owned more than 150 enslaved people when he signed the law that would remove 60,000 Native Americans from their ancestral lands. The act forced Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations westward on routes that killed roughly one in four travelers. Starvation, disease, winter exposure. The Cherokee called their 1838 march the Trail Where They Cried—we know it as the Trail of Tears. Georgia had found gold on Cherokee land two years before the law passed. Sometimes legislation isn't about expansion. It's about who's standing on something valuable.

The regiment marched through Boston streets lined with 20,000 people—more than had watched any military parade in the city's history. Most came to see if Black men could march in formation. They could. The 54th's 1,000 soldiers had turned away twice as many volunteers, and some had walked from as far as Ohio to enlist. Two of Frederick Douglass's sons marched in the ranks. Within three months, they'd assault Fort Wagner in South Carolina, losing nearly half their men in a charge that proved nothing about courage—only that some people needed proof.

Admiral Togo Heihachiro's Japanese fleet destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet at Tsushima in less than two days, sinking 21 ships and capturing seven in the most lopsided naval victory since Trafalgar. The battle forced Russia to accept peace terms and established Japan as a first-rank naval power, the first Asian nation to defeat a European empire in modern warfare.