25. September

Harold marched through York and caught the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge, waiting for their hostages. Snorri says the day was warm and many had left their mail at the ships. Hardrada fell with an arrow in the throat, Tostig with him. Of a fleet counted in hundreds, the survivors needed 24 ships to…

Harald Hardrada invaded England with a fleet counted in hundreds, beat the northern earls at Fulford, and was caught five days later at Stamford Bridge by King Harold, who had marched from the south. Hardrada was killed; the survivors needed 24 ships to go home. Three days later William of…

A crusade of Hungarians, French and Burgundians under King Sigismund charged uphill into Bayezid’s army and was destroyed. John of Nevers, heir to Burgundy, was ransomed for 200,000 florins.

Seventeen ships and some 1,200 men, with horses, cattle, pigs, wheat and sugar cane: the Columbian Exchange had begun. Two years later Columbus shipped some 500 Taíno to Spain to be sold.

From a ridge in the Darién, after three weeks through swamp and forest, with Indigenous guides. Four days later he waded into the sea and claimed it all for Castile. Six years on, his rival Pedrarias had him beheaded.

Each ruler in the Empire could choose between Catholicism and the Augsburg Confession, and his subjects followed or emigrated. Lawyers later called the rule cuius regio, eius religio. Calvinists were left out, a gap that helped start the Thirty Years’ War.

Benedict Arnold, the hero of Saratoga, had agreed to hand the fort at West Point to the British. When his contact, Major John André, was caught with the plans, Arnold escaped to a British ship; André was hanged as a spy.

Madison had once called bills of rights “parchment barriers”, but he had promised amendments to win his seat, and he pushed a reluctant Congress to pass them.

The Teton Lakota were the strongest power on the middle Missouri. They took goods from every trader who passed, and an American plan to trade directly with the nations upriver threatened that. Their interpreter spoke the language poorly, the gifts were small, and when warriors seized a pirogue’s…

Mina is excited before Van Helsing’s visit, expecting news of Lucy. Afterwards she writes: “He has come and gone. Oh, what a strange meeting, and how it all makes my head whirl round!” She has given him the two diaries, copied out, and if she “had not read Jonathan’s journal first, I should never…

Mina answers Van Helsing by wire, signed “Wilhelmina Harker”: “Come to-day by quarter-past ten train if you can catch it.”

“A Hampstead Mystery”: for two or three days young children have strayed on the Heath and come home, or been found next morning, saying they were with a “bloofer lady”. The paper notes that “all who have been missed at night, have been slightly torn or wounded in the throat”, and an Extra Special…

Van Helsing, having read Jonathan’s diary, writes to Mina by hand: “Strange and terrible as it is, it is true! I will pledge my life on it.” A man who went down that wall and to that room, and a second time, “is not one to be injured in permanence by a shock”.

Mina thanks Van Helsing for taking “a great weight off my mind”, and fears “that man, that monster, be really in London”. A wire from Jonathan says he leaves Launceston at 6:25 and arrives at 10:18, and she asks the professor to come to breakfast at eight.

Five men, Kerensky at their head, ran the country while no coalition could be formed.

The Provisional Government’s last cabinet. It ended under arrest in the Winter Palace, all but its head: Kerensky had left to find troops.

After the Kornilov affair the Bolsheviks won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. Trotsky, out of prison on bail, took the chair he had held in 1905.

Allenby broke the Ottoman line on the coast and sent his cavalry, many of them Indian lancers, through the gap to cut off two Ottoman armies. On 23 September the Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers charged into Haifa.

TAT-1: the first transatlantic telephone cableTAT-1

Transatlantic calls had gone by radio since 1927, expensive and at the mercy of the weather. TAT-1 carried 36 calls at once, boosted by vacuum-tube repeaters sealed on the seabed. In its first day 588 calls went between London and the United States.

After a mob drove the students out on 23 September, Eisenhower federalised the Arkansas Guard and sent about 1,200 paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division. Soldiers walked the nine to class and stayed through the school year.

Mujahideen fired the first American-supplied Stinger missiles of the war and brought down three Soviet helicopters near Jalalabad airfield. Soviet air power never regained its freedom of the skies.

Ten days after lighting the cauldron, the Aboriginal runner won the 400 metres in front of 112,000 people, then ran her lap of honour with both flags, the Aboriginal and the Australian.

John McCain suspended his campaign to attend; Barack Obama came too. A deal announced that morning collapsed in the Cabinet Room. Afterwards Paulson went down on one knee to beg Nancy Pelosi not to blow it up.

After depositors pulled 16.7 billion dollars in ten days, regulators closed the Seattle thrift that evening and sold it to JPMorgan for 1.9 billion. With about 307 billion dollars in assets, it remains the largest bank failure in American history.

In a prime-time address the president, who had spent eight years preaching markets, asked the country to back the largest government intervention since the Depression. Polls showed most Americans against it.

First light of FASTFive-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope

A 500-metre dish in a natural karst bowl in Guizhou, made of 4,450 panels that cables pull into a 300-metre parabola wherever it points. The idea of Nan Rendong, it took Arecibo’s title as the largest single-dish telescope and has found hundreds of new pulsars.