16 février

Asked for terms, Ulysses S. Grant answered: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” The fort on the Cumberland River fell with most of its garrison, and “Unconditional Surrender” Grant was famous. Of 17,398 casualties (NPS), 15,067 were Confederate, most of them…

Her first record for Columbia was a hit that made her the best-paid Black entertainer of the decade, the “Empress of the Blues”. But she was paid a flat fee for each side, with no royalties, while the records sold in their hundreds of thousands.

A meditation course at an ashram above the Ganges, with Donovan, Mike Love and Mia Farrow. Starr left after ten days, McCartney after five weeks, Lennon and Harrison in a hurry on 12 April after rumours about the Maharishi. With no drugs and no studio, they wrote most of their next album.

The South Pole Telescope opensSouth Pole Telescope

A 10-metre dish a kilometre from the pole, 2,800 metres up on the ice, where the air is the driest on Earth and a winter night lasts six months. It maps the afterglow of the Big Bang, finding clusters of galaxies by their shadows in it.

IBM’s question-answering system beat the quiz show’s two greatest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a match taped at IBM’s research centre. Under his final answer Jennings wrote: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”