21 août

A Portuguese fleet took the Moroccan port in a day. Prince Henry, 21, was knighted for his part, and Portugal had its first foothold in Africa. The city stayed Spanish when Portugal broke away in 1640, and it is Spanish still.

Galileo took Venetian senators up the bell tower of San Marco to watch ships far out at sea through his eight-power instrument. The Senate confirmed him at Padua for life and doubled his salary to 1,000 florins.

Carter, Paterson & Co. acknowledge the ten pounds and return a cheque for £1 17s. 9d.: the goods “are delivered in exact accordance with instructions”, with the keys left in a parcel in the main hall of Carfax.

Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who had worked at the Louvre, walked out with the panel under his smock on a Monday, when the museum was closed. It was gone for two years and turned up in Florence in December 1913, when he tried to sell it. The theft made it the most famous painting in the…

The Berlin astronomer Erwin Freundlich took cameras to the Crimea to test the bending of starlight. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August; the Russians interned the party and seized the instruments. Had the plates been taken, they would have shown twice the bending Einstein then predicted.

The German Eighth Army crossed the Dvina and took Russia’s second port on the Baltic (3 September New Style), opening the road towards Petrograd.

Goodman’s tour had flopped across the country. In Los Angeles the young crowd had heard his band on the radio, and when it struck up Fletcher Henderson’s arrangements they stopped dancing and pressed round the stand. Henderson, whose own band had gone under, had sold the arrangements to Goodman.

For about a decade jazz was America’s popular music, played by hundreds of dance orchestras. White bands got the hotel residencies, the network radio slots and the film parts; Black bands such as Ellington’s, Basie’s and Jimmie Lunceford’s toured the South by bus, barred from its hotels. In the…

Sergei Korolev’s R-7 flew about 6,000 km from Kazakhstan to Kamchatka. Nineteen years earlier Korolev had been arrested in Stalin’s purges and sent to a Kolyma gold mine. Descendants of his rocket still launch every Soyuz crew.

Twelve years in which both sides turned what they took from Germany into missiles that could carry an atomic bomb across an ocean. The first satellites rode on those missiles.

Soviet, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops crossed the border late on 20 August, and by morning tanks filled Prague. Dubček was flown to Moscow under arrest. The Brezhnev Doctrine that followed claimed a right to intervene wherever socialism was threatened.

Hardliners put Gorbachev under house arrest at his holiday dacha in Crimea and sent tanks into Moscow. Boris Yeltsin climbed onto one outside the Russian parliament and called for resistance. The coup collapsed in three days; three young men died in the streets.

The first Games in South America. A Refugee Olympic Team of ten athletes marched under the Olympic flag, and the ceremonies filled the Maracanã.