16 de junio

About eighteen miles overland, with the canoes on carts of cut-down cottonwood wheels, through prickly pear that pierced their moccasins, heat, hail and grizzlies. What the captains had hoped would take days took a month.

As the second volume of Frege’s foundations of arithmetic went to press, Russell wrote that one of its axioms led to contradiction: the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Frege replied that arithmetic tottered.

General Bruce went down with malaria on the march in, and Norton took command. The party included Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford engineering student, who rebuilt the oxygen sets at base camp. The strongest porters were picked out as “tigers”. Two men from the support staff, Shamsher…

Three years and two months. At the Berlin Olympics in 1936 Cunningham took the 1500 metres silver behind Lovelock.

Neutrons fired into uranium produced activities that Fermi’s group tentatively credited to new elements beyond uranium. Orso Corbino announced them in a speech before the King. In fact they had split uranium and did not know it.

As a boy in Kansas, Cunningham’s legs were so badly burned in a schoolhouse fire that doctors thought he might never walk. He was timed in 4:06.7; the rules of the day rounded it up to the next fifth of a second.

Eleven months, the shortest reign between the wars.

The first World Cup on television, and the highest-scoring: 5.38 goals a match. Austria beat Switzerland 7–5 in Lausanne, still the most goals in one World Cup match.

Valentina Tereshkova, a textile worker and amateur parachutist, spent almost three days in orbit with the call sign Chaika (Seagull): longer than all six Mercury flights put together. The next woman in space flew 19 years later.

Released from jail that evening, SNCC’s chairman Stokely Carmichael told a rally that six years of asking for freedom had got them nothing, and led the crowd in a new chant: “Black Power!” The slogan split the movement.

Thousands of schoolchildren marched against an order that half their subjects be taught in Afrikaans. Police fired into the crowd in Orlando West. Sam Nzima’s photograph of the dying Hector Pieterson, twelve years old, carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo with his sister Antoinette running alongside, went…

Thousands of schoolchildren marched against a rule that half their subjects be taught in Afrikaans, and police opened fire. Sam Nzima’s photograph of the dying Hector Pieterson went round the world. The government’s first count was 176 dead. The Cillié Commission later counted 575 deaths across…

The revolt spread to townships across the country. The official figure for the dead is usually given as 176, but that counted only the first days. The Cillié Commission counted 575 deaths by the end of February 1977, and other estimates run to about 700. Thousands of young people left to join the…

Thirty-one years to the day after his execution, the leader of 1956 lay in state on Heroes’ Square with four of his comrades and a sixth, empty coffin for all the rest. A crowd put at 100,000 to 250,000 heard a 26-year-old Viktor Orbán demand that Soviet troops go home.