1. Juli

Kilij Arslan’s horse archers caught Bohemond’s vanguard alone in the open. It held for hours until Godfrey’s and Raymond’s divisions arrived and the Turks broke, leaving the road across Anatolia open.

Tolui’s eldest son took the throne with Batu’s backing and purged the Ögedeid and Chagatayid princes who opposed him. He ordered a census of the empire and sent Hülegü west and Kublai south.

Louis IX took the cross again and turned toward Tunis, perhaps hoping its emir would convert. Disease killed the king and much of the army in the camp at Carthage.

Lyell and Hooker had extracts from Darwin and Wallace’s essay read one after the other. Neither author was there: Wallace was in the tropics and Darwin was at home, where his baby son Charles Waring had died of scarlet fever. Nobody took much notice; the Society’s president later said the year had…

George McClellan shipped more than 100,000 men to Fort Monroe and crept up the peninsula towards Richmond. He got within a few miles of the city and was driven off.

Lee attacked almost every day for a week and pushed McClellan from the edge of Richmond back to the James River. Lee lost more men, about 20,000 to 16,000 by McPherson’s count, but saved his capital. Malvern Hill alone cost 8,500 (NPS).

About 33,000 people were freed in Suriname and more in the Antilles, but most had to work on the plantations for pay under state supervision for ten more years. Suriname marks the day as Keti Koti, “the chains are cut”.

Lee’s second invasion met the Army of the Potomac at a crossroads town. The largest battle ever fought in North America: about 51,000 casualties (NPS: 23,000 Union, 28,000 Confederate) in three days. Lee never invaded the North again.

Told to get rid of his spiders, Renfield catches a blow-fly and eats it, arguing that it is “life, strong life, and gave life to him”. Seward sees in this “the rudiment” of an idea, and notices that Renfield keeps a notebook full of columns of figures, added up in batches.

Six stages and 2,428 kilometres, the longest 471. Stages averaged over 400 kilometres, so the riders rode through the night and rested one to three days between them; the last stage left Nantes at nine in the evening.

Desgrange ran the race for its first 33 years and handed it to Jacques Goddet in 1936. Sales of the paper rose to 120,000 a day by 1913; banned at the Liberation for collaboration, it was reborn as L’Équipe in 1946.

The start was outside a café on the road south of Paris at Montgeron. Of the sixty starters, 21 reached Paris.

The first Games outside Europe, again tied to a World’s Fair. The journey kept most Europeans away, and most of the athletes were American. Gold, silver and bronze medals were awarded for the first time.

A British and French offensive meant to relieve Verdun. In four and a half months the Allies advanced about ten kilometres, and more than a million men on both sides were killed, wounded or captured.

After a week’s bombardment that had not cut the wire, British infantry went over the top at 07:30. By nightfall the British Army had 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them dead: the worst day in its history. The Newfoundland Regiment went forward at Beaumont-Hamel about 800 strong; 68 men answered the…

From July 1934 no film could open in a major cinema without the seal of Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration. Crime could not be seen to pay, and the guilty were punished by the last reel. The Code began: No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see…

The first of Hägg’s three mile records, and one of ten world records he set in 1942 at distances from 1500 metres to 5000. Andersson ran second.

Sweden stayed out of the war and kept racing. Two Swedes set or equalled the mile record six times in three years, from 4:06.2 to 4:01.4, often against each other in front of full stadiums.

Almost five years, most of them after war broke out in 1939.

Two whole seconds, with Hägg away racing in the United States.

Delegates from 44 Allied nations spent three weeks at a resort hotel in the White Mountains. John Maynard Keynes for Britain and Harry Dexter White for the United States argued out a new order, and White’s dollar-centred plan won. They founded the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Michael Ventris, an architect, told BBC radio listeners that Linear B wrote an early form of Greek — a surprise even to him. He built on the sign grids of Alice Kober, who died in 1950. With John Chadwick he published the proof in 1953; he died in a car crash in 1956, aged 34.

Hillary and Hunt were knighted. Tenzing was not a British subject, and received the George Medal. Born, by his own account, in Khumbu, and by his family’s in Tibet, he had lived in Darjeeling for twenty years; India and Nepal both claimed him. He could not read or write, and spoke several languages.

Eighteen months in which 67 countries pooled observations of the Earth, from Antarctica to the upper atmosphere. It paid for Keeling’s CO₂ measurements at Mauna Loa and the South Pole.

Signed the same day in Washington, London and Moscow: states without the bomb promised not to build one, and the five that had it promised to work toward disarmament. It is still the most widely joined arms-control treaty.

Sony’s founder Masaru Ibuka wanted to hear music on long flights. His engineers took the recorder out of a portable cassette machine and added stereo and light headphones: the TPS-L2 sold for ¥33,000. It had two headphone sockets, so two people could share a tape, but it made music something you…

Same track, a year later. Ovett also equalled Coe’s 1500 metres record that summer.

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, with Melle Mel and Duke Bootee rapping, traded party boasts for a slow, bleak tour of life in a broken neighbourhood. Flash himself hardly played on it. In 2002 it became the first hip-hop recording chosen for the Library of Congress’s National Recording…

The shortest Tour in over eighty years, at 3,285 kilometres. The holder, Pedro Delgado, turned up late for the prologue in Luxembourg and lost nearly three minutes before he had turned a pedal; he fought back to third.

Finland’s prime minister, Harri Holkeri, phoned the deputy mayor of Tampere on Radiolinja’s new network. GSM was digital, encrypted and built around a removable SIM card; it became the world’s mobile standard.

A 96-minute engine burn, made after crossing the ring plane through a gap between two rings, slowed it enough to be captured.

Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, on CNBC. He thought a slowdown more likely than a fall. Seven months later he became chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The 1,142-kilometre line from Golmud to Lhasa crosses the Tanggula Pass at 5,072 metres, the highest railway in the world, and runs for hundreds of kilometres on permafrost, kept frozen with cooling pipes and raised track. The carriages are pumped with oxygen. Critics saw the line as a way to tie…

A time trial in Copenhagen and two more stages in Denmark. Three weeks later a Dane, Jonas Vingegaard, won the Tour.