23 de octubre

Gascons chafing at French taxes invited the English back, and John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, landed with an army. The townspeople opened the gates to him and turned out the French garrison.

“Enlightened rule”. The new era name was proclaimed in the 9th month of 1868 and backdated to that year’s start, and with it came a new rule: one era for each reign, so that the emperor is now known by the name of his era. Japanese calendar: Keiō 4, 9th month, 8th day, from then on Meiji 1

A U.S. Army board under Walter Reed, working in Cuba, reported that yellow fever passes through the bite of a mosquito, as Finlay had said. One member, Jesse Lazear, had died of it a month before after being bitten. William Gorgas used the finding to clear yellow fever from Havana by 1901, and…

Montgomery’s Eighth Army broke Rommel’s line after twelve days of fighting through minefields. Churchill: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Japan sent almost all its remaining fleet against the American landings in the Philippines, in four actions over three days: the largest naval battle in history. It lost the super-battleship Musashi, four carriers and its navy’s power to fight.

Diệm took 98.2 percent of the vote and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam three days later. In Saigon he was credited with 605,025 votes from 450,000 registered voters.

A student march in Budapest turned into a revolution: the giant statue of Stalin was pulled down, Imre Nagy became prime minister and, on 1 November, announced that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact. About 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers were killed, and some 200,000 Hungarians fled…

The last warhead ship, carrying the R-14 warheads, made port hours before the quarantine began. Khrushchev ordered most of the other missile ships home; the R-14s themselves never reached Cuba.

The OAS voted, with no vote against, to back the quarantine under the Rio Treaty. It gave the quarantine a legal basis in the hemisphere’s own defence pact, short of a blockade, which would have been an act of war.

Proclamation 3504, “Interdiction of the Delivery of Offensive Weapons to Cuba”, took effect at 14:00 GMT on 24 October. Ships bound for Cuba would be stopped and searched; those carrying weapons turned back.

Hungary’s reform Communists dismantled their own system from inside, then bargained with the opposition over the rest. Two weeks before the band begins, Politburo member Imre Pozsgay had called 1956 a “popular uprising” on the radio, not the counter-revolution of the official line.

On the anniversary of the 1956 rising, acting head of state Mátyás Szűrös proclaimed the Republic of Hungary from the Parliament balcony; the words “People’s Republic” were gone. The ruling party had already voted itself out of existence on 7 October, re-founding as the Hungarian Socialist Party.

The Law Lords ruled unanimously that a husband can be guilty of raping his wife, ending an exemption traced to Sir Matthew Hale’s claim, published in 1736, that a wife gave irrevocable consent on marrying. Parliament wrote it into statute in 1994.

“1,000 songs in your pocket”: a five-gigabyte hard disk, a scroll wheel and fast syncing with iTunes, for $399. It worked only with Macs at first. Apple stopped making iPods in 2022.