TITLE: May 17 in History: 7 Days That Changed the World
1. 1792 – The Buttonwood Agreement Births Wall Street
On a spring morning in lower Manhattan, twenty-four merchants and stockbrokers gathered beneath a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street and signed a remarkably brief agreement. In just two sentences, they pledged to trade securities only among themselves and to charge a fixed commission rate. That document, less than 400 words long, became the founding charter of what would grow into the New York Stock Exchange. The signers could hardly have imagined the global financial colossus their handshake deal would become. At the time, the young American republic was barely three years into operation under its new Constitution, and the entire securities market consisted of just five issues: three government bonds and two bank stocks. Trading happened informally in coffeehouses and on the street itself. The Buttonwood Agreement formalized something that had been chaotic, and in doing so it laid the groundwork for organized capitalism in America. Every IPO, every market crash, every billionaire's rise and fall traces its institutional lineage back to that tree.
2. 1814 – Norway Declares Itself Free
In a country manor at Eidsvoll, about 70 kilometers north of Oslo, 112 delegates signed Norway's constitution, declaring the kingdom's independence from over four centuries of Danish rule. The document was radical for its time, establishing one of the most democratic systems in Europe at a moment when most of the continent was still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and many monarchies were tightening their grip. Norway's independence wouldn't be fully realized for decades — Sweden quickly forced Norway into a union later that year, which lasted until 1905 — but the constitution itself endured. It remains one of the oldest written constitutions still in force anywhere in the world, second only to the United States Constitution. Today, Syttende Mai (the Seventeenth of May) is Norway's National Day, celebrated not with military parades but with children's processions. Schoolchildren in regional folk costumes march through every town and village, an inversion of typical national-day militarism that says something profound about what Norwegians chose to celebrate.
3. 1875 – The First Kentucky Derby
A crowd of 10,000 spectators packed into a new racetrack called Churchill Downs in Louisville to watch fifteen three-year-old thoroughbreds compete in the inaugural Kentucky Derby. A chestnut colt named Aristides, ridden by African American jockey Oliver Lewis and trained by Ansel Williamson — also Black — crossed the finish line first in 2 minutes and 37¾ seconds. The Derby's early years were dominated by Black jockeys, who won fifteen of the first twenty-eight runnings. This history is often overlooked, but at its founding, the Derby was a showcase of African American horsemanship — until Jim Crow laws and racism pushed Black jockeys out of the sport by the early 20th century. The "Run for the Roses" has now been held continuously for over 150 years, surviving two world wars, the Great Depression, and a global pandemic. It remains the longest-running sporting event in American history, a two-minute race that captures something durable about ritual, tradition, and the strange power of repetition.
4. 1900 – Dorothy Steps Into Oz
When The Wonderful Wizard of Oz arrived in bookstores, L. Frank Baum had hopes for a successful children's book but no idea he was launching one of the most influential fantasy worlds ever created. The first edition's 10,000 copies sold out within two weeks, and within a year, Baum was writing sequels and adapting it for the stage. Baum consciously set out to create an "American fairy tale," distinct from the dark European traditions of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Oz had no severed heads, no fatal punishments, no grim morals — instead, it celebrated cleverness, friendship, and the discovery that you've had what you needed all along. Scholars have read it as everything from a populist allegory about the gold standard to a feminist parable to a meditation on identity. What's clear is its staying power. The 1939 MGM film, which itself turned 87 this year, has been seen by more people than almost any movie ever made. Dorothy's ruby slippers (silver in the book) live in the Smithsonian. Oz endures because it tapped into something universal: the longing to go somewhere extraordinary, and the surprising wisdom of wanting to come home.
5. 1954 – Brown v. Board of Education
In a unanimous decision read from the bench by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the United States Supreme Court declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of "separate but equal" that had governed American race relations for 58 years. With one ruling, the constitutional foundation of legalized segregation in public schools collapsed. The decision was the culmination of decades of strategic litigation led by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, especially Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first Black Supreme Court Justice. Warren had worked methodically to ensure unanimity, knowing that a divided court would give segregationists ammunition to resist. His success in this — securing 9-0 — gave the ruling extraordinary moral force. Implementation, however, was another matter. The Court's follow-up ruling the next year, calling for desegregation "with all deliberate speed," became a watchword for delay. Real integration would require the Civil Rights Movement, federal troops in Little Rock, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and decades of struggle. But Brown lit the fuse — it was the legal earthquake that made everything after possible.
6. 1973 – Watergate Hearings Begin
Sam Ervin, the courtly North Carolina senator with bushy eyebrows and a folksy manner that masked a sharp constitutional mind, gaveled the Senate Watergate Committee to order. For the next several months, Americans would gather around their televisions to watch one of the most consequential political dramas in U.S. history unfold in real time. The hearings methodically unraveled the cover-up of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Witness after witness — John Dean, John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman — revealed a White House culture of dirty tricks, enemies lists, and obstruction of justice. The bombshell came when Alexander Butterfield casually mentioned that Nixon had recorded every conversation in the Oval Office. By August 1974, Richard Nixon had become the only U.S. president to resign from office. The hearings demonstrated that constitutional checks could work, that journalism could matter, and that no one — not even the president — was above the law. They also bred a cynicism about government that has never quite gone away.
7. 1990 – WHO Declassifies Homosexuality
The World Health Organization's General Assembly voted to remove homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), formally ending its decades-long status as a "mental disorder" in the world's most authoritative medical reference. The decision affirmed what gay rights activists had argued for generations and what the American Psychiatric Association had concluded back in 1973: that being gay was not, and had never been, a sickness. The change was more than symbolic. The ICD shapes medical practice, insurance coding, and public policy in virtually every country on Earth. Removing homosexuality from its pages stripped away one of the most powerful pseudo-scientific justifications for legal discrimination, conversion therapy, and social stigma. It marked a shift from pathologizing LGBTQ+ people to recognizing them as healthy variations of human experience. May 17 is now observed worldwide as the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia — IDAHOBIT — chosen specifically to mark this anniversary. In dozens of countries, the day has become a focal point for advocacy, a reminder of how recently this recognition came, and how much work remains in places where it still hasn't.
Reflection
Looking back across these seven moments — a tree on Wall Street, a manor in Eidsvoll, a Louisville racetrack, a Kansas farmhouse in a child's imagination, a courtroom in Washington, a Senate hearing room, a global health assembly — you see history not as a procession of inevitabilities but as a series of choices made by people who couldn't see where they were leading. Twenty-four brokers under a buttonwood tree weren't trying to build Wall Street. Earl Warren wasn't trying to launch the civil rights era; he was just trying to rule on a school case. Yet each decision rippled outward, shaping the world we now take for granted. May 17 reminds us that the future is being written today, in conversations and signatures and small acts of courage whose full meaning won't be visible for a hundred years.