8 novembre

Two laws of 391 had closed the temples in Rome and Egypt. This one, issued at Constantinople, forbade any sacrifice by anyone in any place, and a festival built around sacrifice to Zeus had no legal footing left.

On the causeway into Tenochtitlan, a city of perhaps 200,000. Every word passed through two interpreters: Malintzin, an enslaved Nahua woman, turned Nahuatl into Maya, and the castaway Jerónimo de Aguilar turned Maya into Spanish. The story that Moctezuma took Cortés for a returning god was…

On the causeway into Tenochtitlan, perhaps the largest city in the Americas. Every word passed through two interpreters: Malintzin turned Nahuatl into Maya, and the castaway Jerónimo de Aguilar Maya into Spanish. The story that Moctezuma took Cortés for the returning god Quetzalcoatl was written…

From Cempoala, whose Totonac lord had joined him against the Mexica, up over the mountains, through Tlaxcala and Cholula, and over the pass between Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl into the Basin of Mexico.

Two ships reached the Spice Islands, the goal of the whole voyage, and loaded cloves. The Victoria's cargo alone was worth more than the whole expedition had cost.

The imperial and Catholic League army crushed the Bohemian rebels outside Prague in about two hours. Their Calvinist king, Frederick of the Palatinate, fled and was mocked as the Winter King. Bohemia was made Catholic again by force.

Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard registered the sixteen plays not already owned by other publishers. The book, gathered by John Heminges and Henry Condell with Martin Droeshout’s engraved portrait, holds 36 plays in three sections: 14 comedies, 10 histories and 12 tragedies. Eighteen had never been…

An election held in the middle of the war. Lincoln beat George McClellan, whose party ran on a peace platform, by 212 electoral votes to 21. Soldiers voting in the field backed him by three to one or better.

Emile Berliner, an immigrant from Hanover working in Washington, cut the groove from side to side on a flat disc instead of up and down on a cylinder. A disc could be stamped from a master by the thousand, where cylinders were long recorded or copied a few at a time. That, more than sound quality,…

Working alone in a darkened room of the Physical Institute, Wilhelm Röntgen wrapped a discharge tube in black cardboard and saw a screen painted with barium platinocyanide light up across the room. Whatever reached it went through card, wood and books. He spent the next seven weeks testing it,…

Roger Fry filled the Grafton Galleries with Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and invented a name for them to sell the show. London critics called it a hoax or madness. Virginia Woolf later dated a change in human character to “on or about December 1910”.

American and British troops landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, in Vichy French territory. It was the first great American offensive against Germany, and it put the Axis armies in Africa between two fires.