14. August

Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Tortosa went within weeks. The Templars’ Château Pèlerin, never once taken, was evacuated last. Only the tiny island of Ruad held on, until 1302.

On the eve of the Assumption, with the scaffold down from the first half of the vault, Julius said vespers under Michelangelo’s Noah and his prophets. It was the first time anyone else could see what he had done.

A Boston crowd hung an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the man named to distribute the stamps, from an elm at the corner of Essex Street, then wrecked his office. He resigned three days later. The elm became the Liberty Tree.

By tradition, enslaved leaders from the northern plain met in a wood near Morne-Rouge, where a ceremony led by Dutty Boukman sealed the plan for a rising. The date and details come from later accounts, and historians still argue over them.

Spain’s Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition kept cowpox alive across the Atlantic in 22 orphan boys, vaccinated two at a time, arm to arm. Isabel Zendal, rectora of the A Coruña orphanage, sailed to care for them. Francisco Javier de Balmis crossed the Pacific with 26 Mexican boys to Manila,…

King Frederick William IV of Prussia laid the foundation stone of the completion as a monument to German unity. The Central Cathedral Building Society raised about 60 per cent of the money; the builders used steam engines, rails and an iron roof. The last stone was set on the south spire on 14…

The Cuban physician Carlos Finlay told the Havana academy of sciences that yellow fever was carried by a mosquito, the one now called Aedes aegypti. For nearly twenty years almost nobody believed him.

At the top of the steps, watching the setting sun redden the abbey, Lucy murmurs: “His red eyes again! They are just the same.” Mina does not know what she means.

In the Depression only about 1,300 athletes made the trip, but Los Angeles built the first Olympic village for men and a victory podium. Babe Didrikson won two golds and a silver in athletics.

The Constituent Assembly met at 11 at night for a session timed to end at midnight. In the morning Mountbatten was sworn in as free India’s first governor-general, now at India’s invitation.

Nehru spoke shortly before midnight: “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

As the clock struck twelve the members took a pledge of service to India, and a conch was blown in the hall.

The “Austerity Games”: no new venues, athletes in RAF camps and colleges, food still rationed. Germany and Japan were not invited. Fanny Blankers-Koen, a 30-year-old Dutch mother of two, won four gold medals.

The longest reign in the women’s mile.

Eleven days after winning the Olympic 800 and 1500 metres in Atlanta, back from a break to have a child. Her record stood for twenty-three years.