This Week in History recalls memorable and decisive events and personalities of the past.
May 23rd 1430 – Joan of Arc is captured by the Burgundians while leading an army to raise the Siege of Compiègne.
A key figure of the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, also often called the ‘Maid of Orleans’, is today a national hero of France.
The Hundred Years War was a series of conflicts waged over 116 years between France and England over claims by the English kings to the crown of France. It also was a struggle between the French king and his own nobility, who often sided with the English.
Claiming to have received visions from various saints at the age of 13, Joan, an illiterate peasant girl born to middle class peasants in eastern France, said that she had been chosen by God to drive the English out of France and see the French claimant to the French throne (known as the Dauphin) crowned.
At 16, she would travel to the court of the Dauphin and seek an audience with him. She asked the Dauphin for armour, and travelled with the French army to the city of Orleans, then under assault by the English.
After the French won the siege, the first major French victory in 15 years, many attributed their victory to the presence and piety of Joan.
She would become a symbol of righteous religious resistance to English occupation and would inspire the demoralised French to reverse their fortunes, leading to the eventual defeat of the English.
While on the road on 23 May 1430, she was captured by Burgundians allied to the English. She was handed over to English authorities who would put her on trial for heresy. As this was not a capital offence for first-time offenders, a charge of ‘cross-dressing’ was added. Much of what we know of her life comes from her own testimony at this politically motivated trial. She was found guilty and burned to death by the English.
Her death was a key symbolic event in the formation of French national identity. Joan of Arc would eventually be declared a Catholic saint in 1920.
May 24th 1607 – One hundred English settlers disembark in Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America.
While there were several attempts to settle North America by the English in the years before 1607, Jamestown was the first that stuck. Life was extremely tough for the first settlers and many would die in the early years of the colony. A particularly bad patch led to Jamestown being briefly abandoned in 1610. Local Native Americans of the Powhatan confederacy lived in the area, and, at first, welcomed and aided the new settlers with much-needed supplies and trade. Relations soon soured however; the settlers would crush the Powhatan within four years.
After the capital of Virgina was moved to Williamsburg in 1699, Jamestown slowly declined and was finally abandoned in the mid-1750s.
Today Jamestown is remembered as a birthplace of the colonies that would become the modern United States.
May 25th 1961 – Apollo programme: United States President John F. Kennedy announces before a special joint session of the Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a ‘man on the Moon’ before the end of the decade.
President John F Kennedy’s undertaking came at a risky time, when the American space programme was in poor shape, and well behind the Soviets’.
What followed were feverish years of hard work, which, despite budget constraints, relatively low public support and numerous setbacks, including the death of three astronauts in the 1967 Apollo 1 fire, the Americans would amaze the world by landing two men on the lunar surface within eight years.
In total, 20 missions would be flown, with Apollo 17, the last, landing people on the moon in 1972.
With the entry of private companies into the world of space exploration, the founders of which were often inspired by the Apollo missions, humanity appears once again to be on the edge of a new age of space exploration.
May 26th 1896 – Nicholas II crowned Tsar of Imperial Russia.
Ruling from 1894 until 1917, Tsar Nicholas II saw what was once one of the world’s largest empires collapse into a gruesome civil war and reemerge as the first Marxist-Leninist state, the Soviet Union.
There is some historical debate today as to Nicholas’s role in Russia’s collapse, with many painting him as an out-of-touch, incompetent autocrat with no political skill. Others argue that he inherited a corrupt and dysfunctional empire whose reform would have needed an extraordinary leader.
His reign was defined by two disastrous wars, each resulting in a political crisis. The first was Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The conflict resulted in some limited reforms to the constitution of Russia, but these were severely undermined by Nicholas.
The second was the First World War, which Russia entered on declaring war on Germany and Austro-Hungary. Catastrophic defeats, enormous loss of life and incompetence in the imperial government set the scene for the revolution of 1917 which deposed Nicholas.
After being taken prisoner, Tsar Nicholas and his family would be executed in 1918 by their communist guards, their bodies being dissolved in acid and thrown into a mineshaft.
Today, Nicholas, his wife, and their children are recognised as martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
May 27th 1927 – The Ford Motor Company ceases manufacture of the Ford Model T and begins to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.
Thought of today as the first affordable car, the Ford Model T was a product of steadily improving mass production, which for the first time made cars affordable to middle class families.
Henry Ford would say of the car: ‘I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.’
Going into production in 1908, the Model T would become by far the most sold car in the world. The 16.5 million Model Ts produced by Ford ranked in 2012 as the 8th most sold car in history.
The widespread ownership of cars was a technological innovation that massively changed society, altering patterns of homeownership, the shape of cities, patterns of marriage and birth and even the way people form communities.
May 29th 1953 – Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest
The challenge of climbing the world’s highest mountain was both seductive and dangerous. Expeditions had attempted for years to make it to the top, some of which Tenzing Norgay had been a part of in 1930s, and in 1947 and 1952.
In 1953, a British expedition set out to make another attempt, with 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides and 4 500kgs of equipment. In the initial stages, Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay were assigned by the expedition leader to the same team.
The team’s base camp was established in March 1953, from which they began their slow ascent. On 26 May, two other climbers on the expedition tried to reach the top but turned back when one of their oxygen systems failed.
On 29 May, Hillary and Norgay made a second attempt, and finally made it to the top of the mountain. Norgay left some chocolates as an offering and Hillary left a cross. On climbing back down to their fellow climbers, Hillary said: ‘Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.’
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