19. Juni

The First Crusade, raised after Alexios asked the pope for soldiers, besieged the Seljuk capital. The garrison surrendered to the emperor’s men behind the crusaders’ backs, sparing it a sack, which the crusaders resented.

After a five-week siege the Seljuk capital’s garrison came to terms with Alexios’s officers, not the crusaders, who woke to imperial banners on the walls and no city to plunder.

There was no battle. About 12,000 soldiers built log huts and went short of food, clothing and shoes, and some 1,700 to 2,000 died of typhus, dysentery and other disease.

The British-built raider had taken or burned more than sixty Union merchant ships around the world. The USS Kearsarge sank her in about an hour off Cherbourg, watched from the shore. Édouard Manet painted the fight.

Union troops landed at Galveston and General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” About 250,000 people were enslaved in Texas. The day has been a federal…

Most Americans expected a canal through Nicaragua. Then Mont Pelée killed about 28,000 people on Martinique, and Philippe Bunau-Varilla, once an engineer of the French canal, mailed each senator a Nicaraguan stamp showing a smoking volcano. The Senate voted 42 to 34 for Panama.

Italy became the first team to keep the title, and Vittorio Pozzo is still the only coach to have won two World Cups. Gino Colaussi and Silvio Piola scored two each.

Austria qualified, then ceased to exist when Germany annexed it in March, and several of its players turned out for Germany. The Dutch East Indies became the first Asian team; they lost 6–0 to Hungary and went home after one match.

Korolev’s single-seat capsule was a sphere with an ejection seat: the pilot bailed out at about 7 km and came down under his own parachute. Test flights with dogs, then six crewed flights, four of them in pairs.

Nineteen months of generals replacing one another in Saigon, while the Viet Cong grew and Hanoi began sending regular army units south. The revolving door stopped when Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Nguyễn Cao Kỳ took power together.

The UN’s first world conference on women, in Mexico City for International Women’s Year, launched the Decade for Women, 1976 to 1985. The second met in Copenhagen in 1980; the third, in Nairobi in July 1985, set strategies for the year 2000.

Ceballos and colleagues assumed a background rate twice as high as most earlier work, which works against their own case. Vertebrate extinctions since 1900 still came out up to 100 times faster. They concluded a sixth mass extinction is under way.