7 de mayo

Beethoven, by now deaf, stood beside the conductor Michael Umlauf and beat time. At the end of a movement, or of the whole work, as accounts differ, the contralto Caroline Unger turned him round to see the applause he could not hear. The finale sets Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”.

Four months of flanking marches down the railroad from Dalton. Johnston retreated skilfully; Davis replaced him in July with John Bell Hood, who attacked and lost three battles in eight days around the city.

Two days of blind fighting in scrub forest near the Chancellorsville battlefield. The woods caught fire and wounded men burned where they lay. 29,800 casualties (NPS).

Harker finds a library of English books and magazines, and the Count tells him he longs for London. They go through the papers for the purchase of a house at Purfleet, called Carfax, twenty acres behind a stone wall, next to “a private lunatic asylum”. In the Count’s atlas three places are ringed:…

The U-boat U-20 torpedoed the Cunard liner off southern Ireland without warning. She sank in 18 minutes and 1,198 people died, 128 of them Americans. It turned American opinion against Germany, but the United States stayed neutral for two more years.

At 02:41, in a schoolhouse used as Eisenhower’s headquarters, General Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces, to take effect at 23:01 Central European Time on 8 May.

The last positions fell in the late afternoon and General de Castries’s command bunker was taken. About 11,700 men went into captivity and were marched hundreds of kilometres to the camps; four months later only about 3,290 were handed back.

On the first evening Viet Minh guns firing from the hillsides took the strongpoint Béatrice; Gabrielle fell the next night, and after that the airstrip was out of use. The garrison, reinforced by parachute to about 16,000 men, held on for 56 days on supplies dropped from the air. Washington…

The hardest regime in the bloc fell fastest once it cracked: seven months from a rigged local election to the Brandenburg Gate opening. Free elections followed in March 1990 and unification in October.

The official result gave the single list 98.85 per cent. Church and opposition groups had watched the public counts in polling stations and added up far more “no” votes. They protested on the seventh of every month after.

OV-105, built from spare parts to replace Challenger. Schoolchildren chose the name, after Captain Cook’s ship, hence the British spelling. In 25 missions it fixed Hubble, began the International Space Station and delivered its Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

A long game that Kasparov, short of time, could not convert. The score stood level at 2–2.

President Ricardo Lagos promulgated the new Civil Marriage Law this day; in force from 18 November. Until then couples who wanted out had relied on annulments built on false testimony of a flaw in the wedding. The Philippines is now the only country besides the Vatican where most people cannot…

Regulators published how nineteen big banks would fare in a deep recession: ten needed 74.6 billion dollars more capital between them. Most raised it from investors, and the results calmed the markets.