15. November

From the new Spanish town of San Miguel, near Piura, with 168 men, 62 of them on horseback. Atahualpa’s envoys met them on the way and invited them up into the mountains; the Spaniards climbed the Andes without a fight.

Welcomed by Huáscar’s supporters as liberators from Atahualpa’s generals, the Spaniards stripped the Coricancha of its gold and set up a young son of Huayna Capac, Manco Inca, as a puppet ruler.

Congress adopts the Articles of ConfederationArticles of Confederation

A “firm league of friendship” in which each state kept its sovereignty and one vote, and Congress could not tax. It needed all thirteen states to ratify, and Maryland held out for more than three years over western land claims.

Five new dugouts, burned out Nez Perce fashion, carried the party through rapids that the peoples along the river portaged. The Nez Perce kept their horses for the winter. The wife of Shabono our interpetr we find reconsiles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of…

Sherman burned Atlanta’s military targets, cut his supply line and marched about 62,000 men 300 miles to Savannah, living off the land through a swath up to 60 miles wide. He aimed to break the South’s will as much as its railroads.

A new currency exchanged at one for a trillion paper marks, and within days the dollar was fixed at 4.2 trillion marks. It held, because this time the printing stopped.

George Beadle and Edward Tatum X-rayed bread mould and found mutants that had each lost the ability to make one nutrient: every mutation broke one enzyme. Genes, it seemed, were recipes for proteins. Nobel prize 1958.

Ten crewed flights in 20 months to learn everything Apollo would need: rendezvous, docking, spacewalks and two weeks in orbit. By the end the United States had caught up.

The first commercial microprocessor: a whole processor on one chip of 2,300 transistors, designed by Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor and Masatoshi Shima for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker. Intel bought back the right to sell it for anything else — the start of the business Intel became.

Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber gave a recurrent network a memory cell with gates, so it could carry information across hundreds of steps. LSTMs powered speech recognition and machine translation in phones until transformers took over after 2017.

Sold for £45 in 1958 as a follower’s work, bought for about $1,175 in 2005, restored and shown as a Leonardo by the National Gallery in 2011, it became the most expensive painting ever sold. Its attribution is disputed: some scholars see Leonardo’s hand, others mostly his workshop. It has not been…

King Mohammed VI and President Macron opened the line from Tangier to Kenitra, built for 320 kilometres an hour with French trains and loans. Tangier to Casablanca fell from nearly five hours to 2 hours 10 minutes.