On May 31
No pivotal events are recorded on exactly May 31 in the Human Saga — here is the surrounding week in history.
This week in history (May 28 – Jun 3)
On 29 May 1453, after a siege of some seven weeks begun on 6 April, the army of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, extinguishing the Byzantine Empire that had endured for over a thousand years as the eastern continuation…
According to Herodotus, a solar eclipse that halted a battle between the Medes and Lydians had been foretold by Thales of Miletus, the figure later remembered as the first of the Ionian or Presocratic philosophers.
Signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on 28 May 1830, the Indian Removal Act authorised the federal government to negotiate the exchange of Native American lands east of the Mississippi for territory in the west, opening the way for…
Beginning on 3 June 1839, Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu oversaw the public destruction of roughly 1,000 long tons (some 20,000 chests) of opium that he had compelled British and other foreign merchants to surrender at Canton (Guangzhou).
During the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919, British expeditions led by Arthur Eddington (on Principe, off West Africa) and a Greenwich party at Sobral, Brazil, photographed stars near the obscured Sun and measured the deflection of…
From 3 to 14 June 1992 the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), popularly the 'Earth Summit', convened in Rio de Janeiro, drawing delegations from 178 countries and over 100 heads of state in the largest…