At 8:32:17 a.m. PDT on May 18, 1980, an earthquake took place directly under Mount St. Helens, the only non-dormant volcano in the lower 48 states. It shook off the entire north face of the mountain. This was and remains the largest landslide in recorded history.

As the top of the mountain slid off, the molten rock and steam inside the volcano was exposed to cooler air; when this happened, the mountain exploded and a column of ash rose 80,000 feet in the air (about 15 miles) and mudslides reached 50 miles away. Because the volcano had started to become seismically active about two months before, a vast area around the mountain had been evacuated. Fifty-seven people perished nonetheless.
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The U.S. Supreme Court decided unanimously on this date in 1954 that the establishment of, the existence of, separate public schools for students of different races was unconstitutional. Seventeen states, all in the south, required segregated schools and other facilities for black people and white people. Required.

The decision was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and it remains one of the high points in American history, but only because of how low America’s low, ugly racism brought us all.
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James Boswell described an evening of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s nightly conversation in the pubs in this way: “His mind resembled the vast ampitheater, the Colisæum at Rome. In the center stood his judgement, which like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drives them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.”

Boswell met Dr. Johnson for the first time on this date in 1763. Boswell spent two decades in Johnson’s company; they traveled together, dined together, hung out. Boswell was not an un-busy man himself: he was a lawyer, a man about town, an alcoholic and a romance addict (two children out of wedlock; five children with his wife). And he wrote all the time. Every evening, no matter how much he ate and drank that day, no matter how little he slept the night before, he wrote. Twelve volumes of his diaries have been published on top of his biography of Samuel Johnson and his accounts of travels he took, with and without Johnson.
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