2 de septiembre

Octavian’s admiral Agrippa penned the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra in the Ambracian Gulf. When they broke out, Cleopatra’s squadron fled and Antony followed her; his fleet and army surrendered. Within a year both were dead by their own hands in Alexandria, and Egypt was Rome’s.

Agrippa’s fleet had Antony and Cleopatra penned in the Ambracian Gulf. Cleopatra’s squadron broke out with the war chest, Antony followed with a few ships, and the rest of his fleet and army went over to Octavian.

Agrippa’s fleet had them penned in the Ambracian Gulf. In the afternoon Cleopatra’s sixty ships broke through the line with the war chest and made for Egypt; Antony followed, and his fleet and army went over to Octavian within days.

Edward III’s daughter, about fourteen, was on her way to marry Pedro of Castile when plague swept Bordeaux. Her father wrote to the king of Castile that no one could be surprised that he was desolated by grief.

The houses at the north end of the bridge burned early on Sunday. A gap left by an earlier fire in 1633 acted as a firebreak and kept the flames from crossing to Southwark, but the burning bridge also cut off the water wheels that pumped the City’s water.

Pepys went by water to Whitehall and told Charles II and the Duke of York that unless the King commanded houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire. The King sent him to the Lord Mayor with that order. Diary entry: 2 September 1666

From a high place in the Tower he saw the houses at the end of the bridge all on fire. Taking a boat, he watched people throwing their goods into the river, and noticed that the pigeons would not leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies until some of them burned their wings…

Pepys found Bludworth in Canning Street, “like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck”. Lord! what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it. — the Lord Mayor, as Pepys recorded him Diary entry: 2…

Thomas Farriner, baker to the king’s navy, had banked his oven for the night. His household woke to smoke and escaped over the roofs to a neighbour’s window. Their maid was too frightened to climb and became the fire’s first victim. On the second instant, at one of the clock in the Morning, there…

The fire ran downhill to Thames Street, whose wharves and warehouses were stacked with tallow, oil, coal, timber and spirits, and up onto the north end of London Bridge. By nightfall it was burning on a front of more than half a mile.

It burned about 436 acres, 373 of them inside the City wall. Only six deaths were verified at the time, and that figure is still often repeated. Neil Hanson argues the real toll was far higher, in the hundreds or even thousands: the poor and the unrecorded, and bodies consumed by heat fierce…

After a long dry summer, a strong wind from the east blew the fire westward, away from the Tower and into the heart of the City. It swung and eased on the evening of Tuesday 4 September, and only then could the firebreaks hold.

Sir Thomas Bludworth was roused and came to Pudding Lane. The houses were rented, and he would not order them pulled down without the owners’ consent. In a story first told long afterwards, he said “Pish! A woman might piss it out” and went home to bed.

Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the backside of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough…

Pepys rose at seven. His maid Jane told him that above 300 houses had burned in the night, and that the fire was “now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge”. Diary entry: 2 September 1666

At dusk Pepys and his wife sheltered in a little ale-house on Bankside and watched the fire across the river. We staid till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it…

Under the Calendar Act, Britain and its colonies went to bed on Wednesday 2 September and woke on Thursday 14 September, level at last with Catholic Europe. The act had already moved New Year’s Day from 25 March to 1 January, so 1751 in England ran only from 25 March to 31 December. British dates…

A Wednesday. The Calendar Act of 1750 had already moved New Year’s Day to 1 January, so 1751 had lasted only from 25 March to 31 December.

With the Prussians advancing, crowds broke into the Paris prisons and killed the inmates after mock trials. Pierre Caron’s count is 1,100 to 1,400 dead, about half the prisoners, most of them common criminals. The same day Danton told the Assembly what France needed: “audacity, more audacity,…

Hood blew up his ammunition trains and left. “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Sherman telegraphed. Weeks earlier Lincoln had expected to lose the election; now he was sure to win it.

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.

Seward finds no “functional disturbance” in Lucy and has, by the chance of a cut hand, analysed her blood and found it “quite normal”, yet she is “bloodless”. Unable to explain it, he has written to his “old friend and master, Professor Van Helsing, of Amsterdam”.

Van Helsing answers by return, in his long-sentenced English, that he is coming at once to his “friend John”, recalling the time Seward sucked the gangrene poison from a wound of his, and asks for rooms at the Great Eastern Hotel. “It is to you that I come.”

On the deck of USS Missouri, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu and General Umezu signed for Japan, and MacArthur for the Allied powers. The ceremony took 23 minutes. Six years and a day after Germany invaded Poland, the war was over.

Air power decided battles at sea and on land, and bombers carried the war to cities. The United States alone built nearly 300,000 military aircraft, and the war left behind long runways, radar and a generation of pilots for the airlines.

Japan struck Malaya, Pearl Harbor, the Philippines and Hong Kong within hours, and in six months held an empire from Burma to the Solomon Islands. After Midway the Americans fought back island by island. Japan lost 2.1 million servicemen and, by the National WWII Museum’s count, 2.6 to 3.1 million…

China fought Japan alone for four and a half years before Pearl Harbor, and kept more than half a million Japanese troops tied down to the end. The National WWII Museum puts Chinese deaths at about 20 million; Rana Mitter gives at least 14 million. Japanese forces in China formally surrendered at…

He died in Hanoi on 2 September, the anniversary of the independence he had declared in 1945. The government announced his death as the 3rd so as not to darken National Day. His will asked for cremation; he was embalmed instead and lies in a mausoleum in Ba Đình Square.