15. Juni

Under the year named for the official Bur-Sagale, the eponym list notes that “the sun had an eclipse” in the month Simanu. Astronomers date it to 15 June 763 BCE, and every Assyrian date before and after hangs on it: the list counts years in both directions from here.

On St Vitus’s Day Murad’s army met Prince Lazar of Serbia and his allies on the Field of Blackbirds. Both rulers died: Murad stabbed by a Serbian knight, Lazar executed after the battle. Murad’s son Bayezid had his brother Yakub strangled on the field.

Bayezid annexed the Anatolian emirates, crushed a crusade and blockaded Constantinople for eight years. He called himself Sultan of Rum, heir to the Seljuks, and lost everything in one afternoon to Timur.

Congress chose a Virginian to lead an army of New Englanders, to bind the South to the cause. He declined a salary and asked only for his expenses, and took command at Cambridge on 3 July.

After the 1800 tie, electors cast separate votes for president and vice president. The first election under the new rule was held that autumn.

When the Janissaries overturned their soup cauldrons in revolt against a new drilled corps, Mahmud raised the Prophet’s banner, and artillery shelled their barracks at Et Meydanı. Thousands died, and a decree abolished the corps. Ottomans called it the Auspicious Incident.

The railroad hub that fed Richmond. When the first assaults failed, both armies dug in, and Grant extended the trenches west until Lee’s line was stretched too thin to hold, a foretaste of the Western Front.

Édouard Drumont’s antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole revealed that the company had paid deputies and journalists to get its lottery bonds approved. The financier Jacques de Reinach was found dead in November 1892, and the affair shook the Third Republic.

The old Dundee whaler left London on 1 June and Cardiff, which had given generously in money and coal, on 15 June. She too called at Funchal, on 23 June, then at South Trinidad and Simon’s Town, where Scott came aboard for the run to Melbourne.

In the hut under the boats, by the light of a blubber lamp, the surgeons Macklin and McIlroy took off all five toes of Blackborow’s left foot, under chloroform, with the stove fed hot to warm the air. He recovered.

John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew a converted Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland in about 16 hours, through fog and sleet, and landed nose-down in a bog near Clifden. The Daily Mail paid £10,000 and both were knighted within the week.

No flying school in the United States would teach a Black woman, so the Chicago manicurist learned French and trained in France. She became the first African American woman to hold a pilot’s licence, and flew at air shows across America until her death in 1926.