On May 21, 1502, the Portuguese navigator Joao da Nova, returning from India, came upon a small, uninhabited volcanic island in the remote South Atlantic and named it Saint Helena, after the saint whose feast the Western Church kept on that day. Lying more than a thousand miles from the nearest land, the island became a vital revictualling stop for sailing ships on the long voyage between Europe and the East, prized for its fresh water and game. For most of its history it was administered by the English East India Company and then by the British Crown. Saint Helena owes its lasting fame, however, to a single resident: it was here that the British exiled the defeated Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815, and on this distant rock — chosen precisely because its isolation made escape all but impossible — the former emperor of the French lived out his final years and died in 1821. Today Saint Helena remains a British overseas territory, one of the most isolated inhabited places on earth, and it marks May 21 each year as Saint Helena Day.

On May 21, 1871, the Vitznau-Rigi Railway opened in central Switzerland, climbing Mount Rigi from the shore of Lake Lucerne and becoming the first mountain rack railway in Europe. It was the work of the Swiss engineer Niklaus Riggenbach, who had patented a "ladder rack" system — a toothed rail laid between the running rails that a cog wheel on the locomotive engages — allowing a train to grip the track and haul itself up gradients far too steep for an ordinary adhesion railway. Inspired by the pioneering Mount Washington Cog Railway in the United States, Riggenbach's line let ordinary travelers ascend to a famous Alpine summit in comfort to enjoy the panorama of lakes and peaks, helping to launch the great age of Swiss mountain tourism. The rack-railway principle he proved on the Rigi spread across the Alps and the world, opening summits from the Jungfrau to Pikes Peak to mass tourism, and the Rigi line itself still carries visitors up the mountain today.

On May 21, 1881, Clara Barton and a small circle of associates founded the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C., and Barton became its first president, a post she would hold for 23 years. Barton had earned the nickname "the Angel of the Battlefield" for her fearless work bringing supplies and nursing to wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War, despite having no formal medical training. While in Europe afterward she learned of the international Red Cross movement founded in Switzerland and of the Geneva Convention protecting the war-wounded, and she returned home determined to establish an American branch and to persuade a reluctant government to ratify the convention — which the United States did in 1882, largely through her efforts. Under Barton the new organization broke with its European model by taking on peacetime disaster relief as well as wartime aid, responding to floods, fires and epidemics; this "American Amendment" became part of the global Red Cross mission. Its first local chapter opened soon afterward in Dansville, New York. Today the American Red Cross is one of the largest humanitarian organizations in the United States, known for disaster response and for collecting much of the nation's blood supply.

On May 21, 1901, Connecticut enacted "An Act Regulating the Speed of Motor Vehicles," becoming the first state in the United States to set a statewide speed limit for automobiles. The law capped motor vehicles at 12 miles per hour (about 19 km/h) within cities and 15 miles per hour (about 24 km/h) on country roads, and it further required drivers to slow down — and to stop altogether if necessary — when meeting or passing horse-drawn carriages, so as not to frighten the horses. Violators could be fined up to $200, a steep sum for the era. The bill had been introduced by the state legislator Robert J. Woodruff, whose original proposal set even lower limits. Earlier American ordinances had governed the speed of horses and wagons, and a New York taxi driver had already been arrested for speeding in 1899, but Connecticut's law was the first to regulate automobile speed across an entire state — a small but telling milestone marking the arrival of the motor age and the beginnings of the traffic laws that now blanket the country.

On May 21, 1904, representatives of seven European national football associations — France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland — met in Paris and founded the Federation Internationale de Football Association, universally known by its initials, FIFA. They created it to govern association football (soccer) internationally and to organize competition between national teams, at a time when the sport, codified in England a few decades earlier, was spreading rapidly across the world. From those seven founding members FIFA grew into one of the largest and most powerful sporting bodies on earth, today comprising more than 200 member associations — more than the United Nations has member states. Its flagship tournament, the FIFA World Cup, first held in 1930, has become the most widely watched sporting event in the world, drawing television audiences in the billions. From its headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, FIFA governs the global game, though in recent decades it has also been the subject of major corruption investigations and reform. Its founding in a Paris meeting room in 1904 marks the birth of football as an organized world sport.

On May 21, 1924, two brilliant, wealthy University of Chicago students, 19-year-old Nathan Leopold and 18-year-old Richard Loeb, kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks, a neighbor and distant relative of Loeb, in what they imagined would be the "perfect crime." Steeped in a distorted reading of Nietzsche's idea of the superman, the pair believed their intelligence placed them above ordinary morality and law and committed the killing essentially as an intellectual exercise. Their scheme unraveled almost immediately: Leopold's distinctive eyeglasses were found near the body, and the two soon confessed. The case became one of the most sensational in American criminal history, a national obsession dubbed "the crime of the century." It is remembered above all for the defense mounted by the celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow, who — having his clients plead guilty — delivered a marathon courtroom address against capital punishment that ran for many hours and is regarded as one of the great pieces of legal oratory. Darrow saved the two from execution; they were sentenced to life imprisonment plus 99 years. The case has inspired numerous books, plays and films, including Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.

On the evening of May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh brought his small single-engine monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, down onto the floodlit grass of Le Bourget Field outside Paris, completing the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. He had taken off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, the previous morning, and had flown alone for about 33.5 hours and roughly 5,800 kilometers (some 3,600 miles), without a radio and with no forward windshield, fighting fog, icing and the crushing need for sleep over the open ocean. A crowd estimated at more than 100,000 surged onto the field to greet him, and the 25-year-old former airmail pilot was instantly transformed into one of the most famous people in the world. Lindbergh won the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the New York-to-Paris flight, and his feat — proof that the Atlantic could be crossed by air by a lone aviator — electrified the public imagination and gave an enormous boost to the young aviation industry. The Spirit of St. Louis now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

On May 21, 1932 — exactly five years to the day after Lindbergh reached Paris — Amelia Earhart landed her red Lockheed Vega in a pasture near Derry (Londonderry) in Northern Ireland, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and only the second person, after Lindbergh, to do so. She had taken off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, the previous day on a flight she had aimed at Paris, but a punishing night over the ocean forced her down sooner: a cracked exhaust manifold spat flame, the cockpit leaked fuel, ice formed on the wings, and her altimeter failed. After roughly fifteen hours aloft she set down safely in a field, reportedly asking a startled farmhand where she was. Earhart had become famous in 1928 as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, but as a passenger; the 1932 solo flight let her claim the achievement in her own right. It won her the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross — the first awarded to a woman — and confirmed her as the most celebrated woman in aviation, five years before her disappearance over the Pacific.

On May 21, 1946, the Canadian-born physicist Louis Slotin was fatally irradiated at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico during an experiment with a sphere of plutonium that would become grimly known as the "demon core." Slotin was demonstrating how close two beryllium hemispheres could be brought around the plutonium before the assembly approached criticality — a notoriously dangerous procedure that the physicist Enrico Fermi had reportedly likened to "tickling the dragon's tail." Slotin was holding the upper hemisphere apart with the blade of a screwdriver when the tool slipped; the hemispheres closed, the core flashed into a brief, intense burst of radiation marked by a flash of blue light and a wave of heat, and Slotin instantly pulled the pieces apart with his bare hands, ending the reaction and shielding the seven colleagues in the room. He absorbed a fatal dose and died nine days later. It was the second deadly accident involving the very same plutonium core, which had already killed another physicist, Harry Daghlian, the previous year — hence its nickname. The disaster led to a ban on such hands-on criticality testing and remains one of the most cautionary episodes in the history of nuclear research.

On May 21, 1972 — Pentecost Sunday — a mentally disturbed Hungarian-born geologist named Laszlo Toth leapt a railing in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City and attacked Michelangelo's Pieta with a hammer, shouting that he was Jesus Christ. Before he could be subdued he struck the marble masterpiece more than a dozen times, breaking off part of the Virgin Mary's arm and damaging her nose, eyelid and veil; fragments were scattered, and some were carried off by onlookers before they could be recovered. The Pieta, which Michelangelo had carved in the late 1490s while still in his twenties and which depicts the Virgin cradling the body of the dead Christ, is among the most revered sculptures in the world. Vatican experts undertook a long and meticulous restoration, reassembling the shattered pieces, and the work was returned to view. The attack permanently changed how such treasures are protected: the Pieta has ever since been displayed behind bulletproof glass, and the episode prompted museums and churches around the world to reconsider the security of their most precious works of art.

On May 21, 1994, at the Miss Universe pageant held in Manila, the Philippines, an 18-year-old from India named Sushmita Sen was crowned Miss Universe, the first Indian woman ever to win the title. Competing against 76 other contestants, she took the crown from the outgoing winner, Dayanara Torres of Puerto Rico, with Miss Colombia, Carolina Gomez, as runner-up. Sen, who had won the Femina Miss India title earlier that year — in a contest where the favorite had been the future star Aishwarya Rai — answered the judges' questions in confident English despite having been schooled largely in Hindi, and her poise made a lasting impression. Her victory was a milestone for India: it arrived as the country was opening up to the world in the early 1990s, and later the same year Aishwarya Rai won the Miss World title, giving India both of the major international crowns in a single year and igniting a national fascination with global pageantry. Sushmita Sen went on to a successful career as an actress in Hindi and other Indian films, and her 1994 win remains a touchstone of 1990s Indian popular culture.

Albrecht Durer, born in Nuremberg, was the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance and one of the most influential printmakers in the history of art. The son of a goldsmith, he trained in his father's craft before turning to painting and the graphic arts, and two journeys to Italy brought the ideas of the Italian Renaissance — its science of proportion, perspective and the classical human figure — north of the Alps, which Durer then fused with the meticulous detail of German art. He is celebrated above all as a printmaker, raising the woodcut and the copperplate engraving to the level of high art with works such as the Apocalypse series, Knight, Death and the Devil, Saint Jerome in His Study, and the enigmatic Melencolia I. As a painter he produced penetrating portraits and a series of strikingly self-aware self-portraits, including one in which he depicted himself with the frontal symmetry traditionally reserved for images of Christ. A scholar as well as an artist, he wrote treatises on geometry, fortification and human proportion. Durer's monogram — an "A" enclosing a "D" — became one of the first widely recognized artist's trademarks, and his prints, easily reproduced and circulated, spread his fame and influence across Europe. He died in Nuremberg in 1528.

Alexander Pope, born in London, was the foremost English poet of the early eighteenth century and the supreme master of the heroic couplet — the pair of rhymed iambic-pentameter lines he polished to a brilliance of wit and balance that has never been surpassed. A Roman Catholic at a time of legal disabilities against Catholics, and left with a curved spine and frail health by a childhood illness, he was largely self-educated and made his way by his pen, becoming the first English writer to earn a comfortable living from his work, chiefly through his enormously successful verse translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. His own poems range from the mock-epic brilliance of The Rape of the Lock, which inflates a trivial society quarrel into mock-Homeric grandeur, to the philosophical Essay on Man, the critical Essay on Criticism — source of such proverbial lines as "a little learning is a dangerous thing" and "to err is human, to forgive divine" — and the savage literary satire of The Dunciad. Pope is one of the most quoted poets in the English language after Shakespeare, and his epigrammatic couplets remain embedded in everyday speech. He died at Twickenham, near London, in 1744.

Mary Anning, born in the seaside town of Lyme Regis on the south coast of England, was a self-taught fossil collector and paleontologist whose discoveries helped lay the foundations of the science of prehistoric life — even though, as a working-class woman in early-nineteenth-century England, she was largely denied recognition in her own time. From childhood she combed the crumbling, fossil-rich cliffs of the Dorset coast (today the "Jurassic Coast"), hunting the remains of creatures from a vanished world to sell to collectors and museums. While still a girl she and her brother uncovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified; she later found the first two complete plesiosaur skeletons and the first British pterosaur, along with important fish fossils, and she made acute observations about fossilized digestive remains. Her finds astonished the scientific gentlemen of the day and provided crucial evidence in the dawning debates about extinction and the deep history of the earth, yet because of her sex and class she could not join the Geological Society or publish under her own name, and the men who bought her fossils often took the credit. She is widely thought to be the original of the tongue-twister "she sells seashells by the seashore." Anning died of breast cancer in 1847, and modern scholarship has restored her to her place as one of the great figures of early paleontology.

Henri Rousseau, born in the town of Laval in northwestern France, was a self-taught painter whose vivid, dreamlike pictures — above all his lush imaginary jungles — made him one of the most beloved and influential of the so-called naive or primitive artists. He spent most of his working life as a humble toll collector for the Paris customs service, which earned him the affectionate nickname "Le Douanier" (the customs officer), and he took up painting seriously only in middle age, without formal training. Critics initially mocked his flat perspective and untutored technique, but his bold, meticulous, faintly unsettling canvases — exotic jungles thick with stylized foliage and lurking tigers, dreaming gypsies, and strange flat portraits — won the admiration of the avant-garde, and the young Pablo Picasso famously held a banquet in his honor. Remarkably, Rousseau never saw a real jungle; he assembled his imaginary forests from visits to the botanical gardens and hothouses of Paris and from illustrated books and magazines. His works, such as The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream, had a profound influence on Surrealism and on modern art's embrace of the naive and the fantastic. He died in Paris in 1910.

Giuseppe Mercalli, born in Milan, was an Italian Catholic priest and volcanologist whose name endures in the Mercalli scale, still used worldwide to describe the intensity of earthquakes. Ordained a priest, Mercalli taught natural sciences and devoted himself to the study of volcanoes and earthquakes, becoming director of the Vesuvius Observatory near Naples. He is best remembered for the scale he developed around the turn of the twentieth century, which ranks an earthquake not by the energy it releases — as the later Richter magnitude scale does — but by its observed effects at a given place: how strongly the shaking is felt by people, how objects and buildings respond, and what damage results, on a scale running from barely perceptible tremors to total destruction. Because it measures human-scale impact, the Mercalli intensity scale (in its modern, revised forms) remains valuable for assessing earthquakes in populated areas, complementing magnitude scales. Mercalli died in 1914 in a fire at his home in Naples, a death long surrounded by speculation. His careful observational approach to natural disasters left a lasting mark on seismology.

Willem Einthoven, born in Semarang on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and raised in the Netherlands, was the physiologist who invented the electrocardiograph and so created one of the most important diagnostic tools in all of medicine. A professor at the University of Leiden, Einthoven set out to record the tiny electrical currents generated by the beating heart. Around 1901 he developed the string galvanometer, an exquisitely sensitive instrument in which a fine quartz thread, made conductive and suspended in a magnetic field, deflected in response to the heart's electrical signals, casting a shadow that could be photographed as a tracing. From these recordings he defined the characteristic waves of the heartbeat — labeling them P, Q, R, S and T, the nomenclature cardiologists still use today — and showed how the pattern revealed disorders of the heart. The electrocardiogram, or ECG, became a routine and indispensable part of medicine, and for this work Einthoven was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924. He died in Leiden in 1927.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss, born in Hammondsport, New York, was one of the founding figures of American aviation and, briefly, the fastest man on earth. He began as a bicycle racer and builder who moved on to motorcycles, and in 1907, riding a motorcycle of his own design powered by a V-8 engine he had built for airships, he was timed at 136 miles per hour (about 219 km/h) — making him the fastest human being then recorded. He soon turned to aviation, becoming a brilliant designer of aircraft and engines; in 1908 he made one of the first widely publicized public flights in the United States, and in 1909 he won the first international air race. Curtiss pioneered the seaplane and the flying boat, developed aircraft for the U.S. Navy, and built the famous "Jenny" trainers that taught a generation of American pilots to fly. His aggressive innovation embroiled him in years of bitter patent litigation with the Wright brothers, a feud that shaped the early American aircraft industry. The companies he founded eventually merged into Curtiss-Wright, which remains in business today. Curtiss died in 1930, remembered as a father of American aviation and naval aviation in particular.

Raymond Burr, born in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, was an actor who became one of the most familiar faces on American television through two long-running, hugely popular series. After years in Hollywood films, often cast as a heavy or villain — most memorably as the murderer watched by James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window — Burr found his defining role on the small screen. From 1957 he starred as the brilliant defense attorney Perry Mason, the unbeatable courtroom lawyer of Erle Stanley Gardner's novels, in a series that ran for nearly a decade, won Burr two Emmy Awards, and shaped the template for the television legal drama; he later reprised the role in a long series of popular TV movies. He followed it with another hit, Ironside, playing a paraplegic former chief of detectives who solves crimes from a wheelchair — an early prominent depiction of a disabled hero on American television. A private man who guarded his personal life closely, Burr was also known for his philanthropy and his orchid cultivation. He died in 1993, his Perry Mason indelibly associated with the idea of the incorruptible American defense lawyer.

Andrei Sakharov, born in Moscow, was one of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century: the brilliant physicist who was the principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, and who then turned against the system he had armed to become his country's most courageous champion of human rights. A scientific prodigy, Sakharov played the central role in developing the USSR's thermonuclear weapons in the 1950s, earning the highest Soviet honors. But his close-up view of the nuclear arms race and of the dangers of fallout led him to a profound moral and political reckoning. From the late 1960s he became an outspoken advocate of nuclear arms control, civil liberties, and intellectual freedom, and a defender of persecuted dissidents within the Soviet Union, despite escalating harassment from the state. In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — which Soviet authorities barred him from leaving the country to accept — and in 1980 he was arrested and exiled internally to the closed city of Gorky, where he was kept for nearly seven years until Mikhail Gorbachev permitted his return in 1986. In his final years he was elected to the new Soviet parliament and became a moral voice for reform. He died in Moscow in 1989. The European Union's annual prize for freedom of thought bears his name.

Mr. T, born Laurence Tureaud in Chicago, is an American actor and television personality who became one of the most recognizable pop-culture icons of the 1980s. The son of a large, poor South Side family, he worked as a bouncer and a celebrity bodyguard — adopting the stage name "Mr. T" and his signature look of a Mandinka-warrior-inspired mohawk and many pounds of gold chains — before being cast, on the strength of his imposing presence, as the fearsome boxer Clubber Lang opposite Sylvester Stallone in Rocky III (1982), where he delivered the line "I pity the fool." That same persona made him a star as B. A. Baracus, the gruff, van-driving, flying-fearing mechanic of the hit action series The A-Team, which ran through the mid-1980s and turned Mr. T into a merchandising phenomenon, complete with his own Saturday-morning cartoon and a famous aversion, in character, to milk-drinking weakness. Beyond the tough-guy image he was known for a gentler public message aimed at children, promoting self-respect and education, and he later spoke openly about surviving cancer. Few figures so completely embody the look and swagger of 1980s American popular culture.

Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G. and as Biggie Smalls, born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City to Jamaican immigrant parents, is widely regarded as one of the greatest rappers in the history of hip-hop. Raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, he rose from selling drugs on the street to recording demos that caught the ear of the producer Sean "Puffy" Combs, and his 1994 debut album Ready to Die — vivid, dark, and propelled by hits such as "Juicy" and "Big Poppa" — made him a defining voice of East Coast rap and helped restore New York to the center of a genre then dominated by the West Coast. Famous for his deep, effortless flow, his intricate rhymes and his gift for storytelling, he became the central figure of a commercially triumphant moment in 1990s hip-hop, even as he was drawn into the era's bitter and ultimately deadly East Coast-West Coast rivalry. He was shot and killed in a still-unsolved drive-by shooting in Los Angeles in March 1997, at the age of 24, just weeks before the release of his aptly titled second album, Life After Death, which became a massive posthumous success. His influence on rap remains profound.

Tom Daley, born in Plymouth, England, is one of the most successful and recognizable divers in British sporting history. A prodigy who competed at the World Championships at 13 and at the 2008 Beijing Olympics at 14, he went on to a long career on the 10-meter platform marked by world, European and Commonwealth titles and a string of Olympic medals. After winning bronze at the 2012 London Olympics, where he competed before a home crowd, and again at Rio in 2016, he finally claimed Olympic gold in the synchronized 10-meter platform event at the delayed Tokyo Games in 2021, a triumph more than a decade in the making. Beyond the pool Daley became a widely admired public figure: he came out publicly in 2013 and became a prominent advocate for LGBTQ rights, and he charmed the world during the Tokyo Olympics when he was photographed knitting in the stands, turning his hobby into a celebrated emblem of relaxed self-expression. Articulate and popular, he has used his platform to campaign on issues from mental health to the rights of athletes, and he ranks among Britain's best-loved Olympians.

Josh Allen, born in Firebaugh, California, is one of the most prominent quarterbacks in American professional football. Lightly recruited out of a small California farming town, he played at a junior college before starring at the University of Wyoming, and the Buffalo Bills selected him with the seventh overall pick of the 2018 NFL Draft. He developed into one of the league's premier players, combining a powerful arm and unusual size with the running ability of a far smaller man, and he led the long-struggling Bills back to sustained success and repeated playoff appearances, becoming the face of the franchise and a favorite of its famously devoted fans. A prolific passer and runner who accounts for touchdowns both through the air and on the ground, Allen earned multiple Pro Bowl selections and was named the NFL's Most Valuable Player, cementing his status among the elite quarterbacks of his generation. Known for his toughness, his big-play flair and his popularity in western New York, he ranks among the most recognizable stars in the contemporary NFL.

Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador who died of fever on the banks of the Mississippi River in May 1542, led the first major European expedition into the interior of what is now the southeastern United States. He had already grown rich and famous in the conquest of the Inca Empire in Peru under Francisco Pizarro before he turned, as governor of Cuba, to the exploration of "La Florida." From 1539 his expedition of several hundred men marched for three years through the present-day states of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, searching for gold and a wealthy empire to plunder. They found no riches, but in 1541 they became the first Europeans known to have crossed the Mississippi River. The expedition was marked by brutal violence against the Native peoples it encountered, and the diseases the Europeans carried devastated the populous chiefdoms of the region for generations afterward. De Soto himself, having found neither gold nor glory, sickened and died near the great river he had crossed; his men, to conceal his death from the Native peoples to whom he had claimed to be an immortal deity, are said to have weighted his body and sunk it in the Mississippi.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who died at the age of 43 in the Swedish town of Koping on May 21, 1786, was one of the most gifted experimental chemists of the eighteenth century — and one of the most unlucky in receiving credit for his discoveries. Working quietly as an apothecary rather than in a university, the German-born Swede made an astonishing series of discoveries. He prepared and described oxygen — which he called "fire air" — around 1772, several years before Joseph Priestley's famous experiments, but his findings were published late, and the credit for discovering oxygen went largely to Priestley and to Antoine Lavoisier, who explained it. Scheele also discovered or first isolated chlorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten and several organic acids, and identified compounds that would later bear on photography and other fields. His misfortune in priority became so proverbial that historians have spoken of "Scheele's law" — the rule that the discoverer of a thing is never the person it is named after. A devoted experimentalist, he had the dangerous habit of tasting and smelling the substances he studied, including toxic compounds, and his early death is widely thought to have been hastened by years of such exposure.

Charles-Genevieve-Louis-Auguste-Andre-Timothee d'Eon de Beaumont, known as the Chevalier d'Eon, who died in London on May 21, 1810, was one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic figures of the eighteenth century: a French diplomat, soldier, secret agent and renowned fencer whose life became inseparable from the question of gender. A capable spy in the service of King Louis XV — part of the king's clandestine network known as the Secret du Roi — d'Eon undertook missions to Russia and England and rose to the rank of captain of dragoons, earning a military cross. Caught up in a dangerous quarrel with the French government while in London, holding secret state papers, d'Eon negotiated a settlement under which the French crown officially recognized d'Eon as a woman, and from the late 1770s d'Eon lived openly and by royal command in women's dress for the rest of a long life, becoming a celebrity in both France and England and even giving public fencing exhibitions in a gown. Speculation about d'Eon's sex was a sensation of the age, with large wagers laid on the question; an examination after death reported anatomically male characteristics. The Chevalier's remarkable story has made d'Eon an enduring subject in the history of gender, lending the name to the older term "eonism."

Jane Addams, who died in Chicago on May 21, 1935, was one of the most influential social reformers in American history and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1889, with her partner Ellen Gates Starr, she founded Hull House in a poor immigrant district of Chicago, the most famous of the American settlement houses — community centers where educated reformers lived among the urban poor and provided kindergartens, childcare, classes, clubs, a public kitchen and an art gallery, while studying and campaigning to improve the conditions of slum life. From this base Addams became a national leader in the Progressive movement, campaigning for child-labor laws, the eight-hour workday for women, factory inspection, women's suffrage, and the rights of immigrants, and helping to found organizations including what became the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union. A committed pacifist, she opposed American entry into the First World War and led the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom — work that drew fierce criticism at the time but for which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. By her death she was once again widely revered as a great American humanitarian.

Dame Barbara Cartland, who died in England on May 21, 2000, at the age of 98, was a British author of romance novels who became one of the most prolific and commercially successful writers in the history of publishing. Over a career of some seven decades she produced an astonishing torrent of books — more than 700 titles, by the usual count, many of them written at a rate of one every couple of weeks, dictated from a chaise longue — selling hundreds of millions of copies worldwide and being translated into dozens of languages. Her formula rarely varied: chaste, idealized historical romances, typically set in the Regency or Victorian eras, in which a virtuous young heroine wins the love of a dashing hero. A flamboyant public personality famous for her lavish pink gowns, false eyelashes and outspoken pronouncements, she was a celebrity in her own right and a fixture of British society, and through one of her stepchildren she was, by marriage, step-grandmother to Diana, Princess of Wales. Critics dismissed her prose, but her sheer productivity and popularity were extraordinary, and she once held the Guinness record for the most novels written in a single year.

Sir John Gielgud, who died in England on May 21, 2000, at the age of 96, was one of the towering figures of the twentieth-century English stage, ranked with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson as one of the greatest classical actors of his age. Descended from the famous Terry theatrical family, Gielgud became celebrated above all for his Shakespeare: his Hamlet, first performed in the late 1920s and revived over many years, was regarded as definitive for a generation, and his mellifluous, beautifully modulated voice — perhaps the most admired speaking voice in the English theater — set a standard for the verse-speaking of Shakespearean roles. Over a career of more than seven decades he moved between the classical stage, modern drama and film, reinventing himself in old age as a sought-after character actor; he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the comedy Arthur (1981), playing a sardonic valet, and across his career he gathered the rare combination of an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony — the "EGOT." Knighted for his services to the theater, Gielgud remained active almost to the end of his long life and is remembered as one of the supreme interpreters of the English dramatic tradition.

India observes National Anti-Terrorism Day on May 21, the anniversary of the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Instituted by the Government of India in the aftermath of that killing, the day is intended to turn the country's attention to the human cost of terrorism and political violence and to reaffirm a commitment to peace, unity and humane values. On Anti-Terrorism Day a formal pledge is read aloud in government offices, public-sector undertakings and educational institutions across the country, in which participants affirm their opposition to terrorism and violence and their dedication to safeguarding the harmony and integrity of the nation. The observance ties a specific national tragedy to a broader civic purpose: by marking the date of Rajiv Gandhi's death each year, India keeps alive both his memory and a public conversation about the threat that organized violence poses to a diverse democracy. It is among the more solemn of India's official observances.

May 21 is marked internationally as the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development, a United Nations observance promoted by UNESCO that celebrates the richness of the world's cultures and the importance of intercultural dialogue for peace and sustainable development. The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the day in 2002, following UNESCO's adoption of the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity in 2001 in the wake of events that had underlined the dangers of intolerance. The observance rests on the idea that cultural diversity is, in UNESCO's phrase, as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature — a source of exchange, innovation and creativity — and that the great majority of the world's conflicts have a cultural dimension, so that bridging the gap between cultures is urgent work for peace and security. The day encourages people to learn about cultures other than their own, to value the diversity within their own societies, and to support the dialogue that turns difference from a source of division into a source of mutual enrichment.