31. August

Henry died of dysentery at Vincennes, aged 35, seven weeks before the king he was to succeed. When Charles VI died on 21 October, Henry VI, nine months old, was king of England and, by the treaty, of France. His uncle John, Duke of Bedford, ruled for him in France.

Mehmed built a fortress on the European shore opposite his great-grandfather’s castle, in about four and a half months. Its guns closed the strait to ships bringing grain to Constantinople from the Black Sea; the Turks called it Boğazkesen, the throat-cutter.

Mehmed II built a fortress on the European shore of the Bosporus in about four months. The Turks called it the “Throat-Cutter”; its guns sank a Venetian ship that tried to run past.

The Ottomans sent him to their prison-city on the coast of Palestine. He died near it at Bahjí in 1892, which is how the faith’s holiest places came to be in Haifa and ʿAkká, now a World Heritage Site.

Abdülhamid II granted a constitution, suspended it within fourteen months and ruled alone for thirty years from Yıldız Palace: railways, telegraphs and schools, pan-Islamic politics, censorship and a network of informers.

Arthur asks his friend “Jack” Seward for a favour: Lucy “looks awful, and is getting worse every day”, and he does not dare ask her mother why.

The commander of Kornilov’s cavalry came to Petrograd to see Kerensky, was sent before a court, and shot himself the same day.

John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon asked for funding for a summer workshop at Dartmouth, on the conjecture that intelligence could be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it. Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in…

John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon asked the Rockefeller Foundation to pay for a summer workshop. McCarthy picked the name artificial intelligence for it. The proposal’s founding bet: The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of…

On the Pacific, Matson Navigation reached the same idea by study rather than instinct. Its first container voyage carried 20 boxes on deck from the Bay Area to Hawaii, where the islands’ one-way trade made every saving on the docks count twice.

The Freedom Now Suite went from slavery to the African independence movements, with Abbey Lincoln screaming in “Triptych”, in two sessions, the second on 6 September. Its cover showed a lunch-counter sit-in, made that year.

After a strike at the Lenin Shipyard spread along the coast, the Polish government agreed to the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc. Lech Wałęsa signed with an oversized souvenir pen. Solidarity grew to about ten million members before martial law crushed it in December 1981.

South Korea’s largest carrier ran out of credit. Ports refused its ships for fear of unpaid bills, leaving about $14 billion of cargo at sea or at anchor. A Seoul court declared it bankrupt in February 2017.