7. April

The debt conversion became law. The company’s actual trade, under the Spanish asiento, was shipping enslaved Africans to Spanish America, and it had never made much money at it.

It began at Easter in St Mary parish, led by Tacky, an Akan (Coromantee) man, and spread across Jamaica in a war that lasted into 1761. Vincent Brown counts more than 60 whites killed and more than 500 enslaved people killed in battle, executed or driven to suicide, with about 500 more transported…

Selim founded a European-drilled infantry, the Nizam-ı Cedid, paid for by new taxes, and opened permanent embassies in European capitals. The Janissaries deposed him in 1807, and the Chief Black Eunuch’s men stabbed him in the palace the next year.

Seized by the French in 1802 despite a promise of safety, the revolution’s leader died in a cold cell in the Jura. As he was put aboard ship he is reported to have said, in its most common English wording: In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of…

Beethoven had meant to name his Third Symphony after Napoleon. On a copyist’s score in Vienna the words “intitolata Bonaparte” are scratched out so hard that the paper is torn through. At its first public performance many listeners found it far too long.

Past the mouth of the Yellowstone and into the Missouri Breaks, through herds of buffalo, elk and antelope and the first grizzly bears the captains had seen. Beyond the Knife River they had only the Hidatsa’s descriptions to go on, and those proved good.

Corporal Richard Warfington took the keelboat down to St. Louis with dispatches, Clark’s map of the West, Mandan robes, and boxes of skins, bones, plants and soil for Jefferson, with a live prairie dog and four magpies. The same afternoon the permanent party of 33 headed upriver in two pirogues…

A triangle of cottonwood huts below the five earth-lodge villages at the Knife River, two Mandan and three Hidatsa: the trade centre of the northern plains, where Crow, Cheyenne, Assiniboine and British traders came for corn and goods. The Mandan fed the party through a winter that fell to 45…

A surprise attack drove Grant’s army back to the Tennessee River; Union reinforcements turned it around on the second day. The 23,746 casualties (NPS) were more than in all America’s earlier wars together.

At daylight the “long-desired peak” of Clarence Island showed on the horizon, the first land close enough to reach. Its neighbour, Elephant Island, came into view the next morning.

Germany’s civil service law of 7 April 1933 drove Jewish and dissenting scholars from their posts, among them roughly a quarter of its physicists. Einstein, Franck, Born, Bethe, Frisch, Peierls, Szilárd and Teller left; Italy’s racial laws added Fermi in 1938. Much of the Manhattan Project’s…

The largest battleship ever built sailed for Okinawa with fuel for a one-way trip, to beach herself as a fortress. American carrier aircraft sank her in two hours, with most of her crew, before she was even halfway there.

One instruction set across a family of machines, small to large, so software written for one kept running on the next — a customer could upgrade without rewriting everything. Fortune called it IBM's $5 billion gamble, more than the company earned in a year. It won, and dominated mainframes for…

The IOC had dropped the amateur rule and left each sport to decide. Basketball’s federation, meeting in Munich, voted to admit professionals, and the United States, beaten by the Soviet Union in Seoul, could send its best players for the first time.