May 11 in History

John Bellingham, a bankrupt Liverpool businessman with a personal grievance against the British government, shot Prime Minister Spencer Perceval through the heart in the lobby of the House of Commons on May 11, 1812. Bellingham had spent five years in a Russian prison and blamed the British ambassador for failing to secure his release. He calmly sat down after the shooting and made no attempt to escape. Perceval died within minutes. Bellingham was tried, convicted, and hanged within a week, despite his lawyers' argument that he was insane. He is the only person to have assassinated a British prime minister. Surprisingly, news of the assassination was celebrated by crowds in several English cities, reflecting widespread anger at the economic hardship caused by the Napoleonic Wars and the Orders in Council.

Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company walked off the job on May 11, 1894, after George Pullman cut wages by 25% while maintaining rents in his company town at pre-cut levels. When the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy boycott of all trains carrying Pullman cars, rail traffic across 27 states ground to a halt. President Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 federal troops on the grounds that the strike obstructed mail delivery. The intervention resulted in 30 deaths and the arrest of Debs, who served six months in prison, where he read Karl Marx and became a socialist. The episode led directly to the establishment of Labor Day as a federal holiday in 1894, as a concession to organized labor.

A massive dust storm on May 11, 1934, carried an estimated 350 million tons of topsoil from the drought-stricken Great Plains to the East Coast, depositing dust on the decks of ships 300 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm darkened skies from Chicago to Washington D.C. and dumped fine prairie soil on the streets of New York and Atlanta. The Dust Bowl, which lasted from 1930 to 1940, was caused by a combination of severe drought and decades of aggressive farming that destroyed the native grasslands holding the soil in place. An estimated 2.5 million people fled the affected region, many heading to California. The disaster prompted the creation of the Soil Conservation Service and the planting of a 100-mile-wide shelter belt of trees across the Great Plains.

Israeli Mossad agents identified Adolf Eichmann living under the alias Ricardo Klement in a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. A four-man team grabbed him as he walked home from a bus stop, bundled him into a car, and held him in a safe house for nine days before smuggling him aboard an El Al flight disguised as a sedated crew member. Eichmann had been the SS officer responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jews to extermination camps. His trial in Jerusalem, which lasted from April to December 1961, was the first to be televised internationally. Hannah Arendt covered it for The New Yorker, coining the phrase "the banality of evil." Eichmann was hanged on June 1, 1962, the only execution Israel has ever carried out.

Chechen fighters ambushed Russian federal forces in Ingushetia on May 11, 2000, during the Second Chechen War, demonstrating the insurgency's ability to strike outside Chechnya's borders. The attack exposed the fundamental weakness of Russia's conventional military approach to what had become an asymmetric conflict. Moscow had launched the Second Chechen War in September 1999 after apartment bombings in Russian cities were attributed to Chechen militants. Russian forces captured Grozny in February 2000, but guerrilla resistance persisted for years. The conflict spread terrorism across the North Caucasus and into Russian cities, including the 2002 Moscow theater siege, the 2004 Beslan school massacre, and numerous suicide bombings. The insurgency gradually subsided after 2009 under the authoritarian rule of Ramzan Kadyrov.

Constantine picked a fishing town where Europe meets Asia and spent the treasury building churches. Forty thousand workers had six years to turn Byzantium into something that could rival Rome—forums, hippodromes, walls thick enough to stop armies for a millennium. He called it Nova Roma at the dedication. Nobody cared. Within a generation, everyone just said Constantinople, the city of Constantine. The name he chose disappeared. The name he didn't choose lasted 1,600 years. Sometimes the crowd writes history better than emperors.

American troops stormed the shores of Attu Island in the Aleutians to dislodge a Japanese garrison that had occupied American territory for nearly a year, fighting through Arctic conditions, dense fog, and mountainous terrain. The nineteen-day battle ended when surviving Japanese soldiers launched a suicidal banzai charge, one of the war's largest, leaving only twenty-eight Japanese prisoners from a garrison of 2,900. The Battle of Attu remains the only ground battle fought on American soil during World War II.