What happened on 5 May?

11 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1789 French Revolution From the opening of the Estates-General in May 1789 to Bonaparte's coup of 18 Brumaire (November 1799): France overthrows its monarchy and reshapes European politics for a century.
2. 1821 Death of Napoleon Died on Saint Helena on 5 May 1821; later reinterred at Les Invalides.
3. 2023 End of COVID PHEIC WHO ends the global health emergency for COVID-19.
4. 1813 Born: Soren Kierkegaard Danish philosopher, theologian and cultural critic; widely regarded as the first existentialist; author of Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death.
5. 1789 Estates-General of 1789 opens Louis XVI summons the Estates-General at Versailles for the first time since 1614; triggers the constitutional crisis.
6. 1646 Charles I surrenders to the Scots His field armies destroyed and Oxford besieged, Charles I slips out in disguise and gives himself up to the Scottish army at Newark — gambling he can split his enemies. After eight
7. 1941 Haile Selassie returns to Addis Ababa With British and Commonwealth forces and Ethiopian patriots having broken Italian East Africa, the emperor re-enters his capital five years to the day after the Italians took it.
8. 1961 Alan Shepard: first American in space Three weeks after Gagarin, Freedom 7 arcs fifteen minutes over the Atlantic; twenty days later Kennedy commits America to the Moon.
9. 1927 To the Lighthouse The Ramsay family's long-postponed trip to the lighthouse frames a decade of loss and war — Woolf's elegy for her parents and a summit of modernist fiction.
10. 1881 Pasteur's anthrax vaccine trial at Pouilly-le-Fort Before invited farmers, vets and journalists, Pasteur vaccinates half a flock of sheep and then infects them all with anthrax; on 2 June every vaccinated animal is alive and the re
11. 1915 D'Annunzio's speech at Quarto On the anniversary of Garibaldi's sailing, D'Annunzio harangues a vast crowd at Quarto near Genoa — the opening of the 'Radiant May' agitation that drags Italy into the First World