6. November

The Swedes beat Wallenstein’s army in fog and smoke, but their king rode into the mist and was shot several times. Sweden marks 6 November as Gustavus Adolphus Day; in the Catholic calendar the battle fell on 16 November.

Abraham Lincoln won 180 electoral votes with under 40 percent of the popular vote, against three rivals. He got no votes at all in ten Southern states, and carried not one slave state. His party’s platform: no more slavery in the territories.

Five months between Lincoln’s election and the first shot. President Buchanan held secession illegal but found no power to stop it; Congress’s compromise plans, the Crittenden proposals above all, foundered on slavery in the territories.

The Confederate cruiser had burned Yankee whalers in the Bering Sea in June, not knowing the war was over. Told in August, she sailed round Cape Horn to Liverpool and surrendered to the Royal Navy, the only Confederate ship to circle the globe.

Appomattox did not end the war at once. Confederate armies, departments and one cruiser surrendered one by one over seven months, the last of them in England.

Aizu, the Tokugawa’s staunchest ally, surrendered after a month-long siege of Tsuruga Castle. Earlier, nineteen teenage soldiers of the Byakkotai, the White Tiger Corps, had killed themselves on Iimori Hill, believing the castle had already fallen. Japanese calendar: Meiji 1, 9th month, 22nd day

Mina and Van Helsing walk east to meet Jonathan, and they see the castle’s line cut the sky. Near sunset the converging parties meet: Jonathan pulls the Count’s box from the Szgany’s cart and, with Quincey, prises the lid off. “The whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.” Quincey,…

From the discovery that the Count is bound for Varna on the Czarina Catherine to his end at sunset on 6 November, by train, river and road. The sea and river legs are approximate on the map.

A court had just ruled that marriages by Hindu and Muslim rites had no legal standing, and a £3 annual tax still fell on every freed indentured labourer. Kasturba and other women went to jail first. Then more than two thousand striking Natal coal miners and their families marched across the border…

An Indian Army force landed at Fao to guard the oil of the Persian Gulf and pushed up the Tigris towards Baghdad. It was fought mostly by Indian soldiers, and it ended with Britain holding what became Iraq.

At a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, under a portrait of Newton, the Astronomer Royal announced that the eclipse plates bore Einstein out. The Times next morning ran “Revolution in Science”, and the New York Times four days later “Lights All Askew in the…

Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt to take back the canal Nasser had nationalised. Moscow threatened rockets, but it was Eisenhower, refusing to prop up the falling pound, who forced his allies to stop. The crisis also drew the world’s eyes away from Budapest.

General Assembly resolution 1761 asked member states to break diplomatic relations with South Africa, close their ports to its ships and boycott its goods, and set up a Special Committee against Apartheid. It was not binding, and South Africa’s main Western trading partners opposed it.