2. März

An earthquake threw down the walls of Gallipoli and the Thracian towns, and Orhan’s son Süleyman Pasha moved in and resettled them with Turks. The first permanent Ottoman foothold in Europe was the crossing point for every Balkan campaign that followed.

Driven by a winter wind, fire burned for three days across most of Edo, including the keep of Edo Castle, which was never rebuilt. Estimates of the dead run to 100,000. The shogunate rebuilt with firebreaks and moved temples to the outskirts. Japanese calendar: Meireki 3, 1st month, 18th to 20th day

Samuel Tilden led the popular vote, but 20 electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon were disputed. A 15-member Electoral Commission gave all 20 to Rutherford B. Hayes by 8–7 votes, and the count ended at about 4 a.m. on 2 March: 185 to 184.

Henri Becquerel thought sunlight made uranium salts give off X-rays. When clouds stopped his experiment he left a uranium salt on a wrapped plate in a drawer, developed it anyway on 1 March, and found a strong image. He told the Academy the next day: uranium radiates with no light at all.

Liberals and Octobrists, with Kerensky the one socialist. In its first weeks it freed political prisoners, ended the death penalty and legal discrimination by religion and nationality, and promised a Constituent Assembly, but put off land reform and peace until it met.

In his train at Pskov, with every front commander urging him to go, Nicholas signed away the throne for himself and for his son Alexei, in favour of his brother Michael. The Duma’s envoys Guchkov and Shulgin took the manifesto back to Petrograd. He signed it near midnight but backdated it to…

Alfred Barr’s exhibition came with a chart on its catalogue jacket: movements as names and dates joined by arrows, from Japanese prints and Cézanne down to geometric and non-geometric abstraction. It is the best-known family tree of modern art, and the ancestor of this timeline.

After the Calcutta killings of August 1946, Muslim mobs in this eastern Bengal district attacked Hindus. At seventy-seven he walked barefoot from village to village for months, staying in Muslim homes and asking Hindus to return.

Nine months before Rosa Parks, a fifteen-year-old high-school student was dragged off a Montgomery bus and arrested for refusing to stand for a white passenger. Movement leaders judged her too young to be the face of a test case, but she became one of the four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle.

Davis brought sketches, not finished tunes, to a converted church on East 30th Street. With Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans (Wynton Kelly on “Freddie Freeloader”), Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb he recorded five pieces in two sessions, nearly all of them in the first complete take.

Promulgated by Ayub Khan this day. A husband needed an arbitration council’s written permission to take a second wife, and a divorce took effect only 90 days after notice to the council. Prime Minister Muhammad Ali Bogra’s second marriage in 1955 had set off the protests that led to it.

Three and a half years of bombing North Vietnam, meant to break Hanoi’s will by degrees. Johnson and his aides chose many of the targets themselves. The North dispersed its industry, rebuilt its bridges and kept the trucks moving.

North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces took most of the old imperial capital in a night. U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops retook it street by street; much of the city was destroyed. After the battle, graves were found holding about 2,800 people killed by the occupiers, and estimates of all…

Concorde 001 flies at ToulouseConcorde

André Turcat took the French-built prototype up for 27 minutes. Britain and France had agreed in 1962 to build it together, down to the spelling of its name.

Chinese troops ambushed a Soviet border patrol on a small island in the frozen Ussuri River, and dozens died. The two communist giants were now open enemies, and Washington saw its opening.

The US Food and Drug Administration licensed an antibody test made by Abbott, and blood banks began screening donations. Transfusion had infected thousands, among them about half of all Americans with severe haemophilia.

A ten-year chase to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, then two years alongside it as it swung past the Sun. The mission ended with a controlled crash onto the comet, sending pictures until the last moment.