10. Mai

A sculptor who had hardly worked in fresco covered about 500 square metres with more than 300 figures, standing on a scaffold he designed, head tipped back, not lying down. He wrote a comic sonnet about the stiff neck and the paint dripping on his face.

Tilly’s imperial army stormed the Protestant city, and a fire destroyed almost all of it. Peter Wilson puts the dead at about 20,000, soldiers and civilians. The city dated the sack 10 May; the imperial army, 20 May. “To magdeburgize” became a word for total destruction.

Following Franklin’s published proposal, Thomas-François Dalibard raised an iron rod forty feet tall in a garden north of Paris. In a storm a retired dragoon named Coiffier drew sparks from it: the first proof that lightning is electricity, a month before Franklin’s own kite.

To help the Company sell some 17 million pounds of tea piling up in its London warehouses, Parliament let it ship tea straight to America and sell it through its own agents, cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea, but still under the Townshend duty.

Spain joined the war in 1779 as France’s ally, never the United States’. Bernardo de Gálvez, governor of Louisiana, took Baton Rouge, Mobile and then Pensacola, after a shell blew up a British powder magazine. West Florida became Spanish.

A mutiny of the Company’s sepoys became a rising across northern and central India. Both sides killed prisoners and civilians. The Company’s reprisals, from mass hangings to sepoys blown from cannon, were public and meant to terrify.

On the evening of Sunday 10 May sepoys broke open the jail where 85 troopers were held for refusing the new rifle cartridges, rumoured to be greased with cow and pig fat. They killed British officers and civilians and rode for Delhi that night.

The day after 85 troopers were shackled for refusing the cartridges, sepoys broke open the jail, killed British officers and civilians, and rode through the night to Delhi.

Union cavalry caught Davis’s party at dawn near Irwinville, Georgia. He was wearing his wife’s shawl, which Northern cartoonists turned into a dress. He spent two years in prison at Fort Monroe and was never tried.

From the Montgomery convention to Jefferson Davis’s capture. Its constitution copied the federal one almost clause for clause, but barred any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves”. The capital moved to Richmond in May 1861.

The Central Pacific broke ground in Sacramento and dug east through the Sierra Nevada; the Union Pacific built west from Omaha across the plains. By 1867 about nine in ten of the Central Pacific’s workers were Chinese, paid less than white workers and made to buy their own food. The company kept…

Leland Stanford swung at the last spike and missed, but the telegraph sent the single word “DONE” across the country anyway. Coast to coast now took about a week instead of months. No Chinese workers appear in the famous photograph of the two locomotives meeting.

After five tacks through the reef at the mouth of King Haakon Bay, the boat ran into a small cove on its southern side at dusk. They found a stream of fresh water and lay on the beach drinking from it.

Shackleton, Worsley, Crean, McNish, McCarthy and Vincent sailed the 22½-foot boat, decked over by McNish with canvas and packing-case lids, about 800 nautical miles across the Southern Ocean. Worsley fixed their position with a sextant from a pitching boat on the few days the sun came out.

German panzers crossed the wooded Ardennes, which the French thought impassable to tanks, broke through at Sedan and raced for the Channel, cutting off the best Allied armies in Belgium. France, which had held for four years in the first war, fell in six weeks.

The SCLC’s “Project C” (for confrontation) took on the city King called the most segregated in America, with sit-ins, marches and a boycott of downtown stores. It ended with an agreement to desegregate lunch counters and hire Black clerks; the next night bombs hit King’s brother’s house and the…

With Thabo Mbeki and F. W. de Klerk as his deputies, before a crowd and heads of state from around the world, he said: “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the…

With Thabo Mbeki and F. W. de Klerk as deputies, before heads of state from around the world, the new president ended: “Let freedom reign. The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement!” Air force jets flew over. The seat of the government that had built apartheid became the seat of…

He led a Government of National Unity that included the National Party until 1996, and left the daily running of government more and more to Mbeki. He had said he would serve one term, and did.

Kasparov had the better of it, but Deep Blue found a draw in the endgame. Everything rode on the last game.

At 9,990 m, part of the robot imploded, probably one of its ceramic buoyancy spheres. Floating debris was all that came back.