6 août

Rumours of brigands hired by aristocrats spread from village to village. Peasants armed themselves, found no brigands, and burned manor records of the dues they owed instead.

The sun is hidden in thick clouds high over Kettleness, and the fishermen say a storm is coming. Mina, three more days without news of Jonathan, tries to learn the weather signs.

Ten captured German physicists, Heisenberg and Hahn among them, were held at an English country house wired with microphones. Hahn, who had found fission, felt personally responsible; Heisenberg at first doubted it was an atomic bomb at all.

He was on holiday at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks when Helen Dukas heard the news on the radio and told him. He said only “Oh, weh”: oh, woe.

Three and a half years. In the middle of them Elliott won the Olympic 1500 metres in Rome in a world record, 3:35.6, by almost three seconds.

The twenty-year-old Australian took 2.7 seconds off the record, and five men broke four minutes in the one race. Elliott never lost a senior race at the mile or 1500 metres.

A year and eighteen days.

Vostok 2 made 17 orbits in just over a day. Gherman Titov was the first person to sleep in space and the first to be space sick. At 25 he is still the youngest person to reach orbit.

The second film’s soundtrack, and on side two “Yesterday”: McCartney alone with a guitar and a string quartet, no other Beatle on it. He had woken up with the tune and spent weeks asking people whether he had stolen it.

Lyndon Johnson signed it at the Capitol. It suspended the literacy tests that Southern states had used against Black voters, women and men, and sent federal examiners to register them. In Mississippi Black registration rose from about 7 per cent to about 60 per cent by 1967.

It banned literacy tests and sent federal examiners to register voters where fewer than half the adults were registered. In Mississippi, Black registration rose from 6.7 percent in 1964 to 59.8 percent in 1967. Johnson signed it at the Capitol with Rosa Parks and King looking on.

MTV, which had barely played Black artists in its first years, gave rap a weekly show hosted by the graffiti artist Fab 5 Freddy. It drew such ratings that a daily edition followed, and it carried rap videos into suburban bedrooms across America and, through MTV Europe, far beyond.

In the Pretoria Minute, agreed with the government, the ANC suspended all armed actions in exchange for the release of political prisoners and the return of exiles. Umkhonto we Sizwe was not disbanded until after the 1994 election, when its soldiers joined the new national army.

Tim Berners-Lee posted a summary of his project to a newsgroup and invited anyone to use it. The first web server, a NeXT computer at CERN, bore a label: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”

Berners-Lee posted a summary of the project to the alt.hypertext newsgroup and invited anyone to try it. The first website, info.cern.ch, had been running since December 1990 on a NeXT computer with a label on it: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”

A rocket-powered sky crane lowered the rover on cables to the ground. Radio signals took about 14 minutes to reach Earth, so the “seven minutes of terror” were over before the control room at JPL heard they had begun.

Lin-Manuel Miranda told the life of Alexander Hamilton largely in rap, with the founders played by a mostly Black and Latino cast. It won eleven Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.