31. März

On Easter Sunday Louis VII took the cross before a crowd on the hillside below the abbey. Bernard handed out so many cloth crosses that, Odo of Deuil wrote, he tore up his own habit to make more.

Ferdinand and Isabella gave Jews until the end of July to convert or leave. Tens of thousands left, many for the Ottoman Empire, whose sultan Bayezid II took them in; the Sephardi diaspora spread their Ladino language from Salonica to Amsterdam.

The first of the Coercive Acts, which the colonists called the Intolerable Acts: Boston’s port would be closed from 1 June until the town paid for the tea. The other colonies sent Boston food instead.

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. — Abigail Adams to John Adams John answered that he could not help but laugh.

Edicts of 1633 to 1639 barred Japanese from going abroad on pain of death and shut out the Portuguese. Trade went on through four gates: the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki, Korea through Tsushima, the Ryukyus through Satsuma and the Ainu through Matsumae. The word sakoku itself dates only from…

Perry came back in February with a larger squadron. The treaty signed at Yokohama opened Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships for coal and supplies and allowed a consul, but not trade. Among Perry’s gifts was a quarter-size steam train that ran on a circle of track. Japanese calendar: Kaei 7,…

Schoenberg conducted music by himself, Webern, Zemlinsky and Berg. During Berg’s Altenberg songs the laughter and heckling turned to fights, and the concert was abandoned before its closing Mahler songs. One of the organisers slapped a heckler, and Vienna remembers it as the Watschenkonzert, the…

RCA Victor refused Columbia’s LP and launched a seven-inch disc at 45 revolutions a minute with a large centre hole, on vinyl coloured by genre. After a year of the “war of the speeds”, both won: the LP took albums and classical music, the 45 took singles and the jukebox.

The first commercial computer built in the United States, by ENIAC's Eckert and Mauchly. On election night 1952 CBS used one to forecast Eisenhower's landslide from early returns — then held the forecast back because nobody believed it. The machine was right.

The United States took over the fighting. American troop numbers went from about 23,000 at the start of 1965 to 485,600 at the end of 1967. General Westmoreland’s strategy was attrition: search and destroy, and the body count.

In a televised address Johnson limited the bombing of the North, offered talks, and ended with a sentence his own staff had not all expected: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Moved without warning to the mainland with Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba and Andrew Mlangeni, he shared a large rooftop cell and grew vegetables in oil drums on the roof. After surgery in 1985 he was kept apart, and on his own decided to open talks with the government, starting with the justice minister…

Prisoner 466/64, in a single cell in B Section he could cross in three paces. For thirteen years he broke stone in the glare of a lime quarry, which damaged his eyes. As a D-group prisoner he could have one visit and one letter every six months. The prisoners taught one another, and called the…

Blizzard’s science-fiction strategy game found its biggest audience in South Korea, where broadband and PC bangs — internet cafés rented by the hour — spread after the 1997 financial crisis. Millions of the copies sold worldwide went to Korea.

Emmanuelle Charpentier’s group found a small RNA, tracrRNA, that Streptococcus pyogenes needs to arm its CRISPR system. That month, at a conference in Puerto Rico, she asked Jennifer Doudna to work with her.