30. Juli

Henry ringed the largest city of Normandy and starved it. To stretch its food, the garrison drove thousands of poor townspeople out of the gates, and Henry would not let them through his lines: they died of hunger and cold in the ditch between the walls and the siege lines through the winter.

Catherine II called deputies from every free estate of the empire to Moscow to write a new law code, and gave them her Nakaz: hundreds of articles, most of them taken from Montesquieu and Beccaria. France banned it. The commission never produced its code.

Pennsylvania miners tunnelled under the Confederate line and blew a crater in it with four tons of powder. The attack into the pit became a slaughter, and Black soldiers were shot trying to surrender. 5,300 casualties (NPS).

Near England, with fine weather, the captain wakes to find both the man of the watch and the steersman missing. Only the captain, the mate and two hands are left to work the ship.

Mutsuhito died at 59 after a reign of 45 years, and the Taishō era began the same day. He had come to the throne in a Japan of shōguns and domains and left a constitutional empire with colonies in Taiwan and Korea.

The two sides could not agree on a ball, so each brought its own: Argentina’s for the first half, which they led 2–1, and Uruguay’s for the second, in which Uruguay scored three.

Uruguay won the vote by offering to pay every visitor’s fare and hotel, and to build a stadium for the centenary of its constitution. Only four European teams made the two-week crossing. On the first day Lucien Laurent of France scored the first World Cup goal, against Mexico.

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.

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.

Geoff Hurst scored the first hat-trick in a final. His second hit the bar and bounced down; the Soviet linesman Tofiq Bahramov said it had crossed the line, and people have argued ever since. Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over. It is now! — Kenneth Wolstenholme, BBC

The first World Cup with a mascot, World Cup Willie. Portugal came back from 3–0 down to beat North Korea 5–3 with four goals by Eusébio, the tournament’s top scorer.

Under British military control, Major Ivan Hirst got the bombed plant building cars for the occupation forces. The Beetle became the symbol of West Germany’s economic miracle, was built or assembled in some twenty countries, and ended with 21,529,464 made, the last of them in Mexico.

Beetle number 21,529,464, an Última Edición, went to the company museum in Wolfsburg. In Mexico the “vocho” had been the country’s workhorse and, for decades, the green-and-white taxi of Mexico City.

It created a new regulator for Fannie and Freddie, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and gave the Treasury Paulson’s bazooka: authority to buy their securities with no dollar limit until the end of 2009.

Curiosity’s successor landed in Jezero Crater, an ancient river delta, on 18 February 2021. It is sealing rock cores in tubes for a later mission to bring home.