21 décembre

A Dominican friar told the settlers of Hispaniola they were in mortal sin for the way they worked the Taíno to death: Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? The uproar produced the Laws of Burgos a year later, the first rules for Spain's treatment of the peoples it ruled, and mostly…

Sent to win an alliance for the United States, Franklin lived at Passy in a fur cap and plain coat and became the salons’ image of the New World’s virtue. In 1784 he sat with Lavoisier on the royal commission that found Mesmer’s animal magnetism to be imagination.

Twenty-eight working men, many of them weavers, pooled £28 and opened a shop selling flour, oatmeal, butter, sugar and candles, sharing the profits among the customers. Their rules became the model for the co-operative movement.

Sherman burned Atlanta’s military targets, cut his supply line and marched about 62,000 men 300 miles to Savannah, living off the land through a swath up to 60 miles wide. He aimed to break the South’s will as much as its railroads.

A Royal Navy corvette with 15 of its 17 guns taken out to make room for laboratories sailed from Portsmouth under Captain George Nares, with Charles Wyville Thomson leading the scientists. In three and a half years it covered 68,890 nautical miles and sampled 362 stations. Its dredges brought up…

Twelve men in three teams of four hauled up one of the largest valley glaciers on Earth, first found by Shackleton, through deep soft snow and crevasses, to the Upper Glacier Depot at about 2,400 metres.

Battleship Potemkin premieresBattleship Potemkin

Made for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution by Sergei Eisenstein, then 27. Soviet montage cut shots against each other to make meaning; its Odessa Steps massacre, which never happened as shown, is among the most quoted sequences in film. Britain refused it a certificate for public…

Two quartets, one in each stereo channel, improvised together for about 37 minutes with only brief written signals. The sleeve had a window showing Jackson Pollock’s The White Light, and the title named a movement.

The first successful mission to Mars. It carried a single television camera and a tape recorder that took more than a week to play its pictures back to Earth.

A rally was called to condemn Timișoara. A few minutes into the speech, live on television, the crowd began to jeer and whistle; the camera caught Ceaușescu’s bewildered face before the broadcast cut away. He tried promising pay rises.

PSY’s video became the first on YouTube to be watched a billion times. Two years later it passed 2,147,483,647 views, the most YouTube’s counter could hold, and YouTube had to widen it.