May 6 in History

Manco Inca brought 100,000 warriors to reclaim Cuzco from roughly 200 Spanish defenders. The numbers weren't even close. But those 200 had horses, steel armor, and Incan allies who'd decided Spanish rule beat another civil war. For six months, stones heated in bonfires rained down on thatched roofs while the Spanish rationed horse meat and prayed their Tlaxcalan reinforcements would arrive. They did. Manco withdrew to the mountains, where his shadow government ruled for another thirty-six years. Sometimes winning the battle means nothing if you can't hold what you've taken.

For the first time, an English farmer could walk into his parish church and read God's words in his own language. Henry VIII—the same king who'd broken with Rome partly over his divorce—now ordered every church to chain a Bible in English where anyone could see it. The chains weren't to keep people out. They were to keep the books in. Each Great Bible cost roughly what a laborer earned in two months, and they kept disappearing. By 1541, the revolution Henry wanted to control was already slipping from his hands. Literacy became dangerous.

Richard Cromwell lasted nine months as Lord Protector—shorter than most pregnancies. He didn't want the job in the first place, inherited it from his father Oliver like a family curse. When army officers marched into Westminster in May 1659, he surrendered without a fight. No blood spilled. The Rump Parliament—same cranky MPs his father had kicked out—shuffled back to their seats. Richard retired to his estate, lived quietly for another fifty years. England tried republicanism twice and failed both times. The monarchy was coming back, and everyone knew it.

Christopher Smart prayed in public. Constantly. On London streets, in taverns, dropping to his knees wherever religious fervor struck him. Friends found it embarrassing. Doctors called it madness. In 1757, they committed him to St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, where he'd spend six years locked away for the crime of excessive piety. Inside those walls, Smart wrote "Jubilate Agno," his sprawling poem praising God through everything from mice to the letter B. His cat Jeoffry got seventy-four lines alone. Some prayers, it turns out, require confinement to complete.

The king abandoned his old capital completely, moved everything forty miles downstream, and ordered a palace built on an artificial island. King Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke didn't just want a new home in Bangkok—he needed a fortress surrounded by canals that could hold off Burmese armies while housing his entire court. Construction crews dug a three-mile canal in 1782 to create Rattanakosin Island, then started raising walls. Two and a half centuries later, the Grand Palace covers 2.3 million square feet. What began as military paranoia became Thailand's most visited landmark.

The British East India Company disbanded the 34th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry in punishment for the rebellion of Sepoy Mangal Pandey, who had attacked British officers over the introduction of rifle cartridges rumored to be greased with cow and pig fat. Pandey's execution made him a martyr for Indian resistance, and the regiment's dissolution radicalized soldiers across northern India. Within weeks, the broader Indian Rebellion of 1857 erupted, threatening to end British rule on the subcontinent entirely.

The Confederate government picked a capital just 100 miles from Washington DC. Montgomery, Alabama felt too remote, too disconnected from the war they knew was coming. So on May 21, 1861, they moved everything to Richmond—closer to the fight, closer to their biggest armies, close enough that both capitals could hear each other's church bells on quiet Sundays. Virginia's industrial capacity sweetened the deal. The move also guaranteed something else: when Union forces came south, they'd come straight through Virginia's farms and families first. Geography became destiny.

Robert E. Lee's Confederate army routed the much larger Union Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville in what military historians consider Lee's tactical masterpiece, achieved by dividing his outnumbered force in the face of the enemy. The victory came at a devastating cost when Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by friendly fire during his flanking march. Lee would never find a replacement for Jackson's aggressive battlefield instincts, and the loss haunted the Confederate war effort at Gettysburg two months later.

Confederate General Lee split his army and sent Stonewall Jackson on a daring twelve-mile flank march that collapsed the Union right wing at Chancellorsville, routing General Hooker's Army of the Potomac despite being outnumbered more than two to one. The audacious maneuver is studied in military academies worldwide as a textbook example of calculated risk overcoming numerical disadvantage. Jackson's fatal wounding during the battle's aftermath robbed the Confederacy of its most aggressive field commander at the worst possible moment.

Cavendish had been in Dublin for exactly four hours when the knives came out. He'd just arrived as Ireland's new Chief Secretary, walking through Phoenix Park at dusk with the Under-Secretary Burke. A gang calling themselves the Irish National Invincibles used surgical blades—easier to conceal than guns. Cavendish wasn't even the target. Burke was. Wrong place, catastrophically wrong time. The murders gave British politicians the crisis they needed to crack down on Irish resistance for another generation. And they nearly killed Parnell's Home Rule movement before it could breathe. Four hours.

The ship was supposed to wait for them. Instead, on May 6, 1915, the SY Aurora ripped free from its moorings in a howling Antarctic gale, stranding ten men on the ice with almost no supplies. For 312 days, the vessel drifted helplessly across the Southern Ocean while Captain John King Davis fought to keep his skeleton crew alive. The men on shore? They had no idea their ride home was gone. They kept laying supply depots for Shackleton's crossing party—a crossing that would never happen. Two of them died doing it.