As part of the campaign that would culminate in Scotland's decisive victory at Bannockburn, English forces under Edward II moved toward Stirling Castle in early May 1314 to break the siege laid by Robert the Bruce's brother. The relief expedition, one of the largest English armies ever assembled, would be routed within weeks by a smaller Scottish force, a catastrophe that secured Scottish independence for a generation.
Sigmund Freud was born in the small town of Freiberg in the Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic). Trained as a neurologist in Vienna, he would go on to develop psychoanalysis, introducing concepts like the unconscious, repression, and the Oedipus complex that transformed psychology, literature, and Western culture's understanding of the self, even as many of his specific theories were later challenged or discarded.
On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law, barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States for ten years and prohibiting Chinese immigrants already in the country from becoming citizens. Driven by west-coast labor agitation and racial animus following Chinese railroad and mining labor influxes, the law marked the first major restriction on immigration in American history based explicitly on nationality.
On May 4, 1904, the United States officially took possession of the French Panama Canal Company's assets for $40 million, and by May 6 American engineers were beginning to survey the abandoned French works, rusted machinery, and overgrown excavations left after Ferdinand de Lesseps' failed 1880s attempt. The American effort, applying new sanitation science to defeat yellow fever and malaria, would complete the canal in 1914.
On May 6, 1930, Babe Ruth agreed to a new contract paying him $80,000 annually, an astronomical sum as the country sank into the Great Depression. When asked to justify earning more than President Herbert Hoover, Ruth reportedly quipped that he had a better year than Hoover did, a line that became baseball folklore.
After a transatlantic crossing, the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg caught fire as it approached its mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst. In just 34 seconds the 804-foot airship, the largest flying object ever built, was consumed by flame in front of newsreel cameras and a live radio broadcaster. Thirty-six of the 97 people aboard and one ground crewman died. The disaster, captured in Herbert Morrison's anguished radio cry, 'Oh, the humanity!,' effectively ended commercial airship travel.
In early May 1986, as radioactive fallout from the April 26 Chernobyl explosion spread across Europe, Soviet authorities faced mounting international fury over their initial silence. By May 6, evacuations widened, and Moscow's tightly controlled information strategy began cracking under pressure from Scandinavian countries that had detected the radiation spike days earlier, forcing a grudging acknowledgment of the scale of the catastrophe.
On May 6, 1994, Queen Elizabeth II and French President François Mitterrand inaugurated the Channel Tunnel in a ceremony at Calais, opening a 31-mile rail link beneath the English Channel that had taken six years and over 13,000 workers to build. The tunnel, connecting Folkestone to Coquelles, ended Britain's physical islandhood, an idea first proposed to Napoleon in 1802 nearly two centuries earlier.
In early May 1996, several commercial expeditions, including those led by Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, positioned climbers at camps on Mount Everest ahead of summit attempts. Within days a ferocious storm would strand climbers above 8,000 meters, killing eight people on May 10-11 in a tragedy chronicled in Jon Krakauer's 'Into Thin Air,' exposing the risks of the mountain's growing commercial guiding industry.