May 10

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May 10 is a date that likes to compress enormous events into small spaces. A continent connected by rail. A war leader appointed on the morning a blitzkrieg begins. A humble weed transformed into wine. The scale varies; the intensity does not.

On This Date

1869: The Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory Summit, Utah, marks the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. Central Pacific and Union Pacific rails meet. Leland Stanford swings a silver-headed maul at the final golden spike — and misses. The telegraph operator sends “Done” anyway. The news reaches both coasts simultaneously. Coast-to-coast travel drops from months to days. The country changes shape.

1940: Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom — on the same day that Nazi Germany launches Fall Gelb, the invasion of France and the Low Countries. Churchill later writes: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” Within three weeks, the British Expeditionary Force will be surrounded at Dunkirk.

1994: Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as the first democratically elected president of South Africa, completing the transition from apartheid. He is 75 years old. He served 27 years in prison.

1775: The Second Continental Congress convenes in Philadelphia. They will spend the next year arguing about whether to declare independence, and then they will declare it.

Folk Traditions and Superstitions

In English and Appalachian folk tradition, the first warm weekend of May is the time to gather dandelion heads for dandelion wine. The recipe is simple and very old: pick a gallon of dandelion heads (petals only, no green), pour boiling water over them, add sugar, citrus, and yeast, ferment for weeks, strain and bottle. The result is a pale golden wine that tastes like honey and summer and the peculiar sweetness of something everyone else considers a weed.

Ray Bradbury titled an entire novel after it. He was right: the phrase “dandelion wine” captures a kind of preserved summer better than any other two words in English.

The May 10 weather tradition, from the German: “Warm and dry on the tenth, the barns will bulge at Pentecost.” And conversely: “Frost on the tenth of May, your garden is done for the day.” The Ice Saints (May 11-13) loom.

Astronomical Notes

If you look west after sunset on May 10, you may catch the thin crescent moon — depending on the year’s lunar cycle — low on the horizon in a sky still pale with twilight. The “earthshine” on the unlit portion of a thin crescent is especially visible in May, when atmospheric clarity tends to be high. Da Vinci was the first to correctly explain earthshine as sunlight reflected off Earth illuminating the dark portion of the moon.

Observances

National Shrimp Day (United States). The American appetite for shrimp outpaces every other seafood — roughly 4.6 pounds per person per year. The majority is farmed in Southeast Asia, a supply chain that carries complex labor and environmental questions that a food holiday is unlikely to address.

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• May 8
• May 11: The Ice Saints Arrive, a King Names His Country, and a Legend Departs

More Days Worth Knowing

• May 12
• May 14