History Unfolded: May 22nd's Battles, Birthdays, and Beginnings

On May twenty-second, fourteen fifty-five, two armies met in the streets of a town called St Albans, and England began to tear itself apart. Just a couple of days ago in our historical calendar, we were celebrating Charles Lindbergh's incredible solo flight across the Atlantic, a story of singular vision and daring. But today, we see a different kind of story unfold across the centuries. It’s a day of foundations being laid, and sometimes, foundations being violently ripped up. It’s a day of new ideas taking flight, both literally and figuratively.

And it’s a day that proves, once again, that history isn’t just a collection of dates. It’s a living, breathing argument about who we are and how we got here. And what an argument May twenty-second provides. On this day in 1906, after a three-year slog fighting the patent office, Orville and Wilbur Wright were finally granted U.S. Patent number 821,393 for a “flying machine.” They had already flown, of course, but this… this was the piece of paper that said the idea itself was theirs. The legal foundation for an industry that would change everything.

On the other side of the coin, on this day in 1960, the earth itself reminded us of its power. The most powerful earthquake ever recorded, a magnitude nine-point-five, struck southern Chile. It was so immense it caused tsunamis that traveled all the way to Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines, a catastrophic, planet-shaking event. It was also a day for new voices. In 1930, Harvey Milk was born. He would go on to become one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, a man who gave hope to millions and whose legacy is now celebrated with a state holiday in California.

His was a political foundation, built not on stone, but on courage. And on May twenty-second, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Amnesty Act. In the wake of the Civil War, this was a monumental attempt at healing. It restored full civil rights to almost all of the former Confederates. Almost. About five hundred of the most senior leaders were excluded. It was a gesture of reconciliation, but one that came with an asterisk, a reminder that forgiveness, on a national scale, is never simple. And then there's the story that, for me, just sings.

On this day in 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland, a baby boy named Arthur Conan Doyle was born. The man who would give the world Sherlock Holmes. So let’s go back. Let’s look at two of these stories, side-by-side. One, a story of breaking the world. The other, a story of creating one. Fourteen fifty-five. The First Battle of St Albans. This is it. This is the official, bloody starting pistol for the Wars of the Roses. For thirty years, the two rival branches of the royal family—the House of Lancaster, with its red rose, and the House of York, with its white—would butcher each other for the English throne.

And what I find so utterly compelling about this is how… small it starts. It’s not a grand, nationwide rebellion. It’s a feud that gets out of hand. Richard, Duke of York, feels he’s being sidelined by the advisors to the mentally unstable King Henry the Sixth. He feels his rightful place is being denied. So he gathers his allies, marches on the king’s position at St Albans, and demands to be heard. The king’s men refuse. And so, they fight. In the streets. House to house. It wasn't a huge battle by the standards of the day. Maybe a few hundred casualties.

But it was the kind of casualties that mattered. Several of the King’s most powerful supporters, York’s key rivals, were killed. Blood had been shed between the highest nobles in the land. An invisible line had been crossed. There was no going back. What started as a political dispute in the morning was, by evening, a blood feud that would define a generation. Think about that. The foundation of the Tudor dynasty, of Shakespeare's great histories, of the very shape of the English monarchy… it was all laid right here, in the mud and blood of a market town, because a handful of powerful men couldn't settle an argument.

It’s messy. It’s brutal. It’s devastatingly human. Now. Let’s leave the chaos of fifteenth-century England. Let’s jump forward four hundred and four years. To Edinburgh, in 1859. A world away, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is born. A doctor by training. A man of science, of logic, of observation. And out of his mind springs… a character who is the complete opposite of the chaos of St Albans. Sherlock Holmes. Think about what Holmes represents. He is a force for order in a chaotic world. While the nobles of the Wars of the Roses created chaos to seize power, Holmes imposes order through sheer intellect.

He walks into a room, a crime scene, a life shattered by violence or greed, and he doesn't use a sword. He uses his eyes. His brain. He sees the cigar ash, the scuff on a shoe, the tremor in a client’s hand, and from these tiny, insignificant details, he rebuilds the truth. He creates a narrative that makes sense. It’s just glorious. Conan Doyle didn’t just write detective stories. He created a method. A philosophy. The idea that the world, no matter how confusing it seems, is ultimately knowable. That through logic and reason, you can solve the puzzle.

You can find the truth. That is an incredibly powerful, and deeply comforting, idea. While the Wars of the Roses show us a world where power comes from violence and lineage, Sherlock Holmes offers a different model. Power, in his world, comes from knowledge. The ultimate authority is not the king, but the man who can see what others miss. And people were desperate for that. The stories were a phenomenon. When Conan Doyle tried to kill Holmes off, there was a public outcry. People wore black armbands in mourning. They needed him. They needed to believe that someone, somewhere, could make sense of it all.

So here we are, looking back at May twenty-second. A day that gave us the start of a war that tore a country apart, and the birth of a man who created a character that could put any puzzle back together. What do we do with that? Looking back, from what we might call the future, we can see the pattern. We are always, always caught between these two forces. The impulse to tear things down—the feuds, the rivalries, the battles for dominance that define so much of our political history. And the impulse to build things up—the systems of logic, the stories, the art, the scientific methods that help us make sense of the universe.

The Wars of the Roses feel ancient, but the dynamics are playing out on our screens every single day. Factions fighting for control, arguments escalating into something irreversible. And at the same time, the spirit of Holmes is alive in every scientist in a lab, every journalist chasing a lead, every one of us trying to piece together the truth from a flood of conflicting information. May twenty-second doesn't give us an answer as to which side wins. Instead, it lays out the terms of the struggle. It shows us the raw materials we have to work with: the brutal reality of human conflict, and the astonishing power of the human mind to create order out of that chaos.

We live in the tension between St Albans and 221B Baker Street. The real question the day leaves us with is not about the past. It’s about the present. It asks us which tools we’re going to pick up today. The sword, or the magnifying glass.