May 12: Florence Nightingale, a Soviet City That Declared Itself, and the Day the Crossword Became a Book

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Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, and the date has been International Nurses Day ever since the International Council of Nurses designated it in 1974. But nursing is only the beginning of what she actually did, and the way she is remembered — the lady with the lamp, the angel of Scutari, the gentle ministrant to wounded soldiers — systematically understates how aggressive, analytical, and politically dangerous she was. She invented the polar area diagram to communicate mortality statistics. She lobbied Parliament. She wrote a 1,000-page report that restructured British military medicine. She corresponded with statisticians and ran hospitals like supply chain managers. The lamp is real. Everything else in the popular image has been softened beyond recognition.

That May 12 also carries the Limerick Soviet — a short-lived workers’ republic in an Irish city, 1919 — and the first book of crossword puzzles, and Yom Yerushalayim, the Israeli commemoration of Jerusalem’s reunification: this is a date comfortable with unlikely combinations.

Florence Nightingale, Who Was Not What You Were Told

She was born in Florence, Italy — hence the name — to a wealthy English family who did not expect their daughter to pursue anything so declassé as a career. Florence Nightingale pursued nursing anyway, against sustained family opposition, and arrived in Scutari (now Üsküdar, Istanbul) in November 1854 with 38 nurses to work in the British military hospitals during the Crimean War.

What she found was not primarily a problem of nursing care. It was a problem of sanitation. The Barrack Hospital at Scutari had no proper sewage system, overcrowded wards, inadequate ventilation, and insufficient food. Soldiers were dying not from their wounds but from cholera, dysentery, and typhoid — preventable diseases caused by filth. Nightingale and her team scrubbed wards, improved ventilation, lobbied for food supplies, and established a laundry. The mortality rate at Scutari dropped from roughly 42 percent to 2 percent.

This is the famous story. What is less famous is what she did with the data. She was trained in statistics — unusual for a woman in the 1850s, unusual for anyone in the 1850s — and she used the Scutari mortality records to create what she called the “polar area diagram” or “rose diagram,” a circular graph showing monthly mortality causes by area. It is one of the earliest examples of statistical visualization designed explicitly to change a policy decision. She presented these charts to the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army (1857) and to anyone else who would look at them. The charts were designed so that a politician could understand in thirty seconds what would take an hour to read in a report.

She was also, by the end of her life, an effective administrator of the British colonial health system in India — a system she never visited. She corresponded extensively with Indian officials and compiled sanitation data on Indian cities from London. Her analysis identified overcrowding and poor water supply as the primary killers of Indian civilians under British rule. That she also participated, uncritically, in the structures of that same British colonial administration is true and uncomfortable, and worth holding alongside her genuine work on sanitation and statistics.

Nightingale lived to 90. She spent her last three decades largely bedridden with what was probably brucellosis contracted in Crimea, combined with depression. She continued writing, corresponding, and influencing health policy from her bed. She received the Royal Red Cross in 1883 and the Order of Merit in 1907 — the first woman to receive it. The lamp was a prop. The work was structural.

The Limerick Soviet, 1919

On April 15, 1919, British military authorities arrested a local Sinn Féin activist named Robert Byrne and attempted to transport him to prison. A rescue attempt at Limerick railway station left Byrne dead and the British soldier who shot him also dead. The British responded by declaring Limerick a Special Military Area, requiring all civilians to carry military passes to enter or leave the city.

The Limerick Trades and Labour Council, meeting on April 14, called a general strike. By April 15, virtually every worker in Limerick — approximately 14,000 people — had walked off the job. The strike committee began issuing its own currency (with a face on it, printed on church paper), organizing food distribution, and running the city’s essential services. For roughly two weeks, Limerick was effectively governed by the strike committee rather than by British or Irish Republican authority.

The Limerick Soviet lasted from April 14 to May 27, 1919 — with its peak of organizational control concentrated in the earlier weeks. It is remembered in local history with a mixture of pride and what-might-have-been: the committee was explicitly non-revolutionary, focused on the specific military permit grievance rather than a systemic challenge to capitalism or British rule, and ended when the Catholic Church negotiated a settlement and the military permits were abolished. The broader Irish Republican movement did not embrace the Soviet’s example; Sinn Féin’s leadership was skeptical of anything that looked like Bolshevism.

The Limerick Soviet was not a revolution. But for roughly two weeks in the spring of 1919, in a medium-sized Irish city, a workers’ committee ran the shops, the prices, the distribution of food, and the currency, and the city continued to function. The question of what that proves, or disproves, about what is possible when workers organize, is one that historians and political theorists have not finished arguing about.

The Crossword Book

Crossword puzzles had been appearing in newspapers since Arthur Wynne published the first one in the New York World on December 21, 1913. For a decade, they were a newspaper feature — ephemeral, disposable, consumed and forgotten. On May 12, 1924, Simon & Schuster published The Cross Word Puzzle Book, the first-ever collection of crossword puzzles in book form. It was also the first book Simon & Schuster published.

The story of that first book is a story of creative accounting and borrowed pencils. Richard Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster were young publishers with no money and no reputation. Simon’s aunt, Wixie Stern, was an enthusiastic crossword solver who complained she couldn’t find all the puzzles she wanted. Simon told her he’d publish a book of them. He then approached the New York World’s puzzle editor, Margaret Petherbridge (later Margaret Farrar, who would become the New York Times crossword editor for 27 years), and her colleagues Prosper Buranelli and F. Gregory Hartswick, who compiled the puzzles. Simon & Schuster couldn’t afford to include a pencil with each copy, so they attached a pencil on a string to a stand at the bookstore for customers to try the puzzles. When the book sold, they could afford actual pencils.

The book sold 100,000 copies in its first year. The crossword craze, which had been building since 1913, became a full cultural phenomenon. By the mid-1920s, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was putting dictionaries in its dining cars for crossword-solving passengers. The Merriam-Webster dictionary reported a surge in sales. A crossword-themed musical opened on Broadway. Margaret Petherbridge’s name appeared in a gossip column alongside movie stars. A decade after Wynne’s first puzzle, Simon & Schuster’s book had turned a newspaper diversion into a national obsession.

The crossword puzzle is now one of the longest-lived mass entertainment formats in American cultural history — longer-lived than radio drama, longer-lived than silent film, longer-lived than the variety show. The New York Times puzzle celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2022. The format has outlasted almost everything that was considered a cultural institution in 1924.

Yom Yerushalayim

In the Hebrew calendar, Yom Yerushalayim — Jerusalem Day — falls on the 28th of Iyar, commemorating the reunification of Jerusalem under Israeli control during the Six-Day War on June 7, 1967. The date on the Gregorian calendar varies annually, but in some years falls on or near May 12.

The day is observed differently depending on who is observing it. For Israeli religious nationalists, it is one of the most significant dates in the Jewish calendar — the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the city’s holy sites for the first time since the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Religious Zionists mark it with prayer and celebration. Secular Israelis observe it more quietly, if at all. Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, and the broader Arab world do not observe it.

The geopolitical status of Jerusalem — whether it is the capital of Israel, whether it is a shared capital of a future Palestinian state, whether its eastern portion is occupied territory under international law — remains one of the most contested questions in contemporary international relations. Yom Yerushalayim is celebrated by people for whom that question is settled. The celebration itself, in the form of the annual “flag march” through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, has been a recurring source of violence. The date carries weight in every direction.

Also on This Day

• 1551: The National University of San Marcos is founded in Lima, Peru, making it the oldest continuously operating university in the Americas. It was established by a royal decree of Charles I of Spain (also Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor), nearly a century before Harvard. The university survived the Spanish colonial period, Peruvian independence, military coups, and the Shining Path insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s.
• 1932: The body of Charles Lindbergh Jr. is found near Hopewell, New Jersey, ten weeks after his abduction. He is 20 months old. The case leads to the Federal Kidnapping Act — known as the Lindbergh Law — making interstate kidnapping a federal crime punishable by death. Bruno Richard Hauptmann is executed for the crime in 1936. Questions about his guilt, or his exclusive guilt, continue to circulate.
• 1975: The Mayaguez incident concludes when U.S. forces retake the SS Mayaguez from Cambodian Khmer Rouge forces who had seized it three days earlier. The operation kills 41 American servicemen — more Americans than were held hostage on the ship. The crew had already been released before the assault began. The Ford administration initially claimed a diplomatic victory.
• 1910: Florence Nightingale dies on May 13, but on May 12 — her 90th birthday — she becomes the first woman to receive the Order of Merit. She receives the news in bed. She has been largely bedridden for decades.
• 2002: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter arrives in Cuba for a five-day visit, becoming the first sitting or former American president to visit the island since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. He delivers a speech on Cuban television calling for democratic reforms and the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo — broadcast live and uncensored by the Cuban government, which is a remarkable fact about the visit.
• May 10

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