8 février

Louis’s brother Robert of Artois forded the Nile canal and, against orders, charged into the town, where he and most of the Templars with him were killed in the streets. Jean de Joinville fought that day and survived.

Dated 1666 in the statute book, because England’s year began on 25 March, but passed in February 1667. New houses had to be brick or stone, in four sizes set by the width of the street, and a coal tax paid for the churches and public buildings.

A month after his election on the strength of his reflecting telescope, Newton’s letter was read to the Society: white light is a mixture of all the colours, which a prism only separates. Hooke’s dismissive reply began a lifelong feud.

The first of two evenings at the Natural Science Society; the second was on 8 March. Eight years of crossing peas in the abbey garden had given him the same pattern in each of seven traits: one form vanishes in the hybrids and returns in a quarter of their offspring, 3 to 1. For seed shape he…

Japan opened the war over Korea and Manchuria with a torpedo attack on Port Arthur two days before it declared war. It was the first great victory of an Asian power over a European one in modern times.

The Birth of a Nation premieresThe Birth of a Nation

D. W. Griffith’s three-hour Civil War epic showed what a feature film could do with cross-cutting, close-ups and scale. It also glorified the Ku Klux Klan: the NAACP campaigned against it across the country, and the Klan was refounded that November and used the film to recruit.

Applied to the whole universe, his equations would not let it stand still, so he added a term, λ, to hold it static. He dropped it once the universe turned out to be expanding, and George Gamow reported him calling it his “biggest blunder”. In 1998 the discovery that the expansion is speeding up…

After nights of protest against a segregated bowling alley, highway patrolmen fired on students on the campus of South Carolina State. They killed Samuel Hammond Jr., Delano Middleton and Henry Smith and wounded about 28 others, most shot in the back or side. The only man convicted was a…

South Vietnamese divisions drove down Route 9 toward Tchepone to cut the Trail. Congress had barred American ground troops from Laos, so their advisers stayed behind and only the helicopters and bombers went in. The retreat under fire became a rout, and the test of Vietnamization failed.

The first Winter Games in a socialist country. Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skated “Boléro” to a row of perfect sixes. Eight years later the siege of Sarajevo turned the venues into front lines and the fields by the stadium into cemeteries.

Won with gifts and payments to IOC members, which came out in 1998: ten members were expelled or resigned, and the IOC banned its members from visiting bid cities. The Games went ahead five months after 9/11 under heavy security.

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, two solo albums in one sleeve, won the Grammy’s top prize. André 3000’s “Hey Ya!” had spent nine weeks at No. 1. Nine years after the Source Awards, the South had said it.

A decade from OutKast’s first album to its Album of the Year. Houston had the Geto Boys and DJ Screw, New Orleans had bounce and the labels No Limit and Cash Money, Atlanta had OutKast, Goodie Mob and, by the end, trap. By 2004 the South was selling more rap than New York or Los Angeles.