24. August

Letter 6.16 opens with “nonum kal. Septembres”, nine days before the Kalends of September: 24 August, the day after the Vulcanalia, the feast of the fire god. That is the reading of the best manuscripts, but the copies disagree, and some give November or December instead. The case for autumn:…

The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken. — Jerome, in Bethlehem Alaric’s Visigoths came in through the Salarian Gate and plundered for three days: the first time in eight hundred years a foreign enemy had taken Rome. Augustine answered the pagans who blamed Christianity with The…

The Franciscan John of Plano Carpini, the pope’s envoy, saw the enthronement near Karakorum. He carried home Güyük’s reply to Innocent IV, written in Persian, which told the pope to come in person and submit. The letter is in the Vatican archives.

Güyük’s short reign was spent in feud with his cousin Batu. He died in 1248 on the march west, perhaps on his way to settle it by war.

With Philip’s army behind him and every Somme bridge broken or held, Edward was shown a tidal ford below Abbeville, by a local man named in Froissart as Gobin Agace. The English forced it at low tide against a French force on the far bank, two days before Crécy.

The port on the strait that every ship between India and China passed. The apothecary Tomé Pires, who lived there soon after, wrote: Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.

The Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri, in his seventies, died on the field north of Aleppo when his left wing went over to the Ottomans. Syria fell without another battle.

After a year of rebellion by the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, the Scottish Parliament adopted a Reformed confession drafted by John Knox and his colleagues, abolished the pope’s authority and forbade the Mass. The Catholic Queen Mary, then in France, never gave her assent.

Six days after the Protestant Henry of Navarre married the king’s sister in Paris, the Huguenot leader Admiral Coligny was murdered and Catholic crowds turned on the Protestants who had come for the wedding. The usual estimate, which Mack Holt follows, is about 2,000 killed in Paris and some 3,000…

After the war the Company’s Bengal agent came back to a village on the Hooghly. Sutanuti, Kalikata and Gobindapur grew into Calcutta, the capital of British India until 1911. In 2003 the Calcutta High Court ruled that the city has no founding date, and that this day is not one.

Over Lemhi Pass on Shoshone horses. Clark scouted the Salmon River and found it impassable, so a Shoshone guide the captains called Old Toby led them north over the mountains into the Bitterroot valley.

Born free in Salvador, sold into slavery by his father at ten, Gama taught himself to read, proved his own freedom, and became a lawyer without a degree. He won freedom in court for more than 500 people.

Mina tells Lucy from the hospital in Buda-Pesth that Jonathan, still weak, has handed her his journal and asked her never to read it unless some solemn duty requires. They are married that same afternoon by the English chaplain, Jonathan propped up in bed, and she seals the book with her wedding…

Lucy begins a diary: “I must imitate Mina, and keep writing things down.” Last night she “seemed to be dreaming again just as I was at Whitby” and remembers nothing. She is weak and afraid, and when Arthur comes to lunch he looks grieved at the sight of her.

From Lucy’s return to Hillingham to her burial, with four transfusions of blood given by Arthur, Dr. Seward, Van Helsing and Quincey Morris, and the deaths of Lucy’s mother and of Arthur’s father.

Six pairs of chambers, each 1,000 feet by 110 feet, in three places: Gatun on the Atlantic side, Pedro Miguel and Miraflores on the Pacific. They took about 4.4 million cubic yards of concrete, and electric locomotives on the walls tow ships through.

Serbian troops under Stepa Stepanović drove the first Austro-Hungarian invasion back across the Drina: the first Allied victory of the war.

Paul Weyland’s self-styled working group of German scientists hired the hall to denounce relativity, with antisemitic undertones and the Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard in support. Einstein sat in a box and laughed, then answered them in the Berliner Tageblatt three days later.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about sixfold in eight years, carried by radio, cars and buying on margin: loans to brokers passed 8 billion dollars in 1929.

Adam Michnik had named the deal in a July headline: “Your president, our prime minister”. The Sejm confirmed Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Catholic editor and Solidarity adviser, by 378 votes to 4, with 41 abstentions.

The Start menu and taskbar, launched to the Rolling Stones' “Start Me Up”. People queued at midnight to buy an operating system.

Seven months after New Horizons left, the International Astronomical Union’s General Assembly voted that a planet must have cleared its orbit. Pluto became a dwarf planet while the first probe to it was in flight.

Opened at 8 p.m. on 8/8/08, eight being a lucky number in Chinese. The torch relay drew protests over Tibet across the world, and China won the most golds. Michael Phelps won eight, a record for one Games.

The last of the five, in the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard: the deepest point of the Arctic Ocean.

Victor Vescovo set out to dive the deepest point of each of the five oceans in Limiting Factor, a two-person Triton sub built to go to full ocean depth again and again. Its support ship mapped each trench with sonar before he went down.