13. Mai

Before dawn the enslaved pilot took a Confederate steamer from its wharf, picked up his wife, children and other families, gave the signals as he passed Fort Sumter, and handed the ship to the Union blockade. He later served five terms in Congress.

The last battle of the war, near the mouth of the Rio Grande, a month after Appomattox, and a Confederate victory. Union losses were 118 (NPS). Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana is held to be the last man killed in combat.

Seventeen years from the Free Womb law to the Golden Law, in which abolitionist clubs, lawyers, rafters and the enslaved themselves wore slavery down while the parliament of coffee planters stalled.

Princess Isabel, regent while her father was abroad, signed a law of two articles. It freed about 700,000 people, with no compensation for owners and no land or help for the freed. The monarchy fell the next year. É declarada extincta desde a data desta lei a escravidão no Brazil. (“Slavery in…

The Faculty of Sciences gave her Pierre’s chair, “an exceptional decision, as up to then no woman had held such a position”. She became full professor in 1908, moved to a house in Sceaux near his grave, and in 1910 the radiology congress in Brussels named the unit of radioactivity the curie.

Italy invaded Egypt from Libya in September 1940 and was routed; Rommel’s Afrika Korps arrived in February 1941. For two years the front swung back and forth along one coast road between El Agheila and El Alamein, until the Allies closed in from both ends.

Squeezed between the armies from Egypt and from Algeria, the last German and Italian troops in Africa gave up on the Cape Bon peninsula. About 250,000 prisoners were taken, as many as at Stalingrad.

Talks opened at the Hôtel Majestic on the avenue Kléber. When Saigon and the Front joined, the parties spent ten weeks arguing over the shape of the table, since the Front and Saigon would not sit as equals. The real bargaining came later, in secret.

The World Health Assembly set the goal when wild polio paralysed an estimated 350,000 children a year in more than 125 countries. Cases have fallen by more than 99 per cent. Wild types 2 and 3 are gone; wild type 1 is still endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

On Endeavour’s first flight, STS-49, two attempts to grab a stranded communications satellite with a capture bar failed. Pierre Thuot, Richard Hieb and Thomas Akers then went out together, the first three-person spacewalk, and caught it with their gloved hands.