1 août

Antony’s last troops deserted, and he fell on his sword. Rome kept 1 August as a holiday, and the month Sextilis was renamed August partly in memory of this victory.

His fleet and cavalry went over to Octavian. Told falsely that Cleopatra was dead, Antony stabbed himself, and was hauled up into her mausoleum to die in her arms. Rome kept 1 August as a holiday.

His uncle Justin I died, four months after making him co-emperor. He had married Theodora, a former actress, once Justin changed the law that barred senators from marrying actresses. Crowned Augusta in April, she ruled as his partner until her death in 548.

At Bowood House, where he was Lord Shelburne's librarian, Joseph Priestley focused sunlight through a twelve-inch burning lens onto mercuric oxide. In the gas it gave off, a candle burned “with a remarkably vigorous flame”. He told Lavoisier about it over dinner in Paris that October, and…

Children under six were freed outright. Everyone else became an “apprentice”, bound to work 45 unpaid hours a week for their former owner. Antigua and Bermuda skipped it. Protest in the colonies and a new campaign in Britain ended it two years early, on 1 August 1838.

Children under six were freed outright. Everyone else became an “apprentice”, bound to work 45 unpaid hours a week for their former owner. Antigua and Bermuda skipped it. Protest in the colonies and a new campaign in Britain ended it two years early, on 1 August 1838.

Two days of fog and not a sail in sight. Without the hands to work the sails, the captain dares not lower them and has to run before the wind, “drifting to some terrible doom”. The men are Russian; the mate, he notes, is Roumanian.

On the East Cliff Mr. Swales lectures Mina and Lucy on the tombstones: “It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel.” Half the graves, he says, are as empty as “old Dun’s ’bacca-box on Friday night”, since the men named on them drowned far from Whitby.

General Nogi Maresuke’s army took the Russian fortress by frontal assault at a terrible cost; the key was 203 Metre Hill, taken in December, from which Japanese guns could reach the Russian fleet in the harbour. Both of Nogi’s sons died in the war.

Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard man-hauled through the polar night to collect emperor penguin eggs. Their thermometer read −77.5 °F (−60.8 °C). They took five eggs and brought three home. Cherry-Garrard called it the worst journey in the world.

He sent back the Kaisar-i-Hind medal he had won for his ambulance work and called on Indians to boycott British courts, schools, councils and cloth, promising swaraj within a year. Allied with the Muslim Khilafat movement, it became the largest challenge to the Raj since 1857. Crowds burned…

Awarded to Weimar Germany in 1931 and staged by the Nazi regime as propaganda, after a boycott campaign in the United States failed. The torch relay from Olympia began here, and Leni Riefenstahl filmed it all for Olympia.

The musicians’ union, led by James Petrillo, struck against the record companies, whose records were replacing live players on radio and jukeboxes. Decca settled in 1943, Victor and Columbia in November 1944. So the birth of bebop went unrecorded: Earl Hines’s 1943 band, with Parker and Gillespie,…

The Polish Home Army rose to free the capital before the Red Army arrived. The Soviets halted across the Vistula, and the Germans crushed the rising in 63 days. Estimates of the civilians killed run from 150,000 to 200,000; afterwards Hitler ordered the city razed.

Thirty-five states, the United States and Canada among them, accepted Europe’s post-war borders, which Moscow wanted, and promised to respect human rights, which it thought cost nothing. Dissidents from Moscow to Prague held their governments to that promise.

A Games remembered for its bill: the Olympic Stadium’s cost overruns left Quebec with a debt it took thirty years to pay off, and the stadium its nickname, the Big O.

A week before the Beijing Olympics, trains began covering the 117 kilometres in about half an hour. It was China’s first line built for passengers only, and the start of the largest high-speed network in the world.

In sixteen years China built more high-speed line than the rest of the world together. By the end of 2024 it had 48,000 kilometres of it and planned 60,000 by 2030. The World Bank found fares and costs lower than elsewhere, and many lines deep in debt.

The first broad law on AI, sorting systems by risk: some uses banned outright, “high-risk” ones such as hiring and credit scoring under strict duties. Its rules apply in stages through 2027.