3. August

Jasaw Chan K’awiil “brought down the flint and shield” of Calakmul’s king Yich’aak K’ahk’, the phrase for defeating an army. Tikal raised monuments again, and the Snake kingdom never recovered its hold on the south. Long Count 9.13.3.7.18 11 Etz’nab 11 Ch’en

Eleven months of blockade starved the town out after Philip’s relief army came and went without fighting. Froissart tells of six burghers offering their lives in their shirts, halters round their necks, and Queen Philippa begging them off. Edward expelled most of the townspeople and settled…

Three ships and about 90 men from Palos. Columbus thought Asia lay some 4,000 km west of the Canaries; the real distance is about 19,000 km, and he never accepted that he had found anything else.

The first formal council. Lewis read a speech telling the Otoe and Missouria chiefs that they had a new “great father” in Washington, handed out peace medals and flags, and asked them to make peace with their neighbours. The captains named the place Council Bluff. The Otoe and Missouria, who had…

The mate whispers that he has seen “It”, tall and thin and pale, and that his knife went through it. He goes down to the hold to open the boxes, comes up screaming, says “the sea will save me from Him” and throws himself overboard. The captain is now alone.

Another week without news of Jonathan. Lucy has walked less in her sleep, but “even in her sleep she seems to be watching me”: she tries the locked door and searches the room for the key.

Two days out of London, Shackleton went ashore at Margate and read of Britain’s general mobilization. He offered the ships, the stores and the men to the Admiralty. Within an hour came a one-word reply: “Proceed”, then a longer wire from Winston Churchill. War was declared the next night.

Woken at his family’s farmhouse in Vermont, Calvin Coolidge took the oath at 2:47 in the morning by the light of a kerosene lamp, from his father, a notary public.

Helsinki finally held the Games it had lost in 1940. Paavo Nurmi, now 55, carried the torch into the stadium, and the Soviet Union and Israel competed for the first time.

A secret decree committed the USSR to landing a cosmonaut on the Moon. Rival design bureaus split the work and fought over it, the giant N1 rocket failed all four of its launches, and until 1989 the Soviet Union denied it had ever been in the race.

The first Games in Eastern Europe, with 80 nations, the fewest since 1956. Some Western athletes came anyway and marched under the Olympic flag. The mascot, Misha the bear, wept a tear in the card stunt at the closing ceremony.

Suge Knight told the New York crowd that any artist who didn’t want an executive producer dancing in their videos should come to Death Row, a jab at Sean Combs. Later the audience booed OutKast’s win for best new group, and André 3000 answered: “The South got somethin’ to say!”

The first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, from March 2011. It confirmed water ice in craters near the poles that never see sunlight, then ran out of fuel and crashed into the planet.