17 septembre

The Constitution is signedUnited States Constitution

Thirty-nine delegates signed; three refused. Franklin, looking at the sun carved on Washington’s chair, said he now knew it was “a rising and not a setting Sun”.

Called to revise the Articles, the delegates threw them out and met in secret all summer. What we know of the debates comes mostly from James Madison’s notes, published in 1840.

A former parsonage sixteen miles from London, bought for £2,200. Darwin worked in the study in the mornings, walked the gravel Sandwalk at the bottom of the garden to think, and turned the house, greenhouse and lawns into a laboratory. He rarely left it for forty years.

Lodgings at Great Marlborough Street, then after his marriage a house on Upper Gower Street that the couple called “Macaw Cottage” for its gaudy colours. He edited the zoology of the voyage, served as a secretary of the Geological Society, and began the illness that dogged him for the rest of his…

The bloodiest single day in American history: about 23,100 casualties (NPS) in the Cornfield, the Sunken Road and at Burnside’s Bridge. Lee withdrew across the Potomac the next night. Alexander Gardner’s photographs of the dead were shown in New York within weeks.

Renfield bursts into Seward’s study with a dinner-knife and wounds Seward’s wrist, then licks the blood from the floor, repeating “The blood is the life! The blood is the life!” Seward cannot afford to lose blood, he writes, after the strain of Lucy’s illness.

Mina writes Lucy that Mr. Hawkins, at Exeter, has left them everything in his will, and that Jonathan is now a partner, in “Hawkins & Harker”. The letter is marked “Unopened by her.”

Lucy writes of four days and nights of peace: “I am getting so strong again that I hardly know myself.” It is “as if I had passed through some long nightmare”. Dr. Van Helsing is going to Amsterdam for a day, but she is “well enough to be left alone”.

Lucy leaves a record in her breast “so that no one may by any chance get into trouble through me”. A wolf howls outside, her mother dies of the shock at the broken window, and the maids lie drugged with laudanum. She writes, “Good-bye, dear Arthur, if I should not survive this night.”

From Antwerp Van Helsing wires Seward: “Do not fail to be at Hillingham to-night.” The telegram, sent to “Carfax, Sussex” as no county was given, arrives twenty-two hours late.

During Orville’s trials for the US Army a propeller cracked and struck a bracing wire, and the Flyer dived into the parade ground. His passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, became the first person killed in a powered aeroplane; Orville broke a leg and several ribs.

The alliance of non-cooperation had collapsed into riots, the worst at Kohat. He fasted in the Delhi house of his Khilafat ally Mohamed Ali as “a penance and a prayer”.

With the Polish army already beaten in the west, the Red Army crossed the eastern border to take its share under the secret protocol. The Soviet zone ran roughly along the Bug river, and more than a million of its people were later deported east.

On tour in Grand Forks, Armstrong told a student reporter that, the way Black children were being treated at Little Rock, “the government can go to hell”, called President Eisenhower gutless and cancelled a planned State Department tour of the Soviet Union. When Eisenhower sent troops a week…

Enterprise rolls outSpace Shuttle Enterprise

The first orbiter was to be Constitution. A write-in campaign by Star Trek fans changed it to Enterprise, and several of the show’s cast stood at the rollout in Palmdale. It had no engines or heat shield and never went to space.

A record 159 nations came, despite North Korea’s boycott. Tennis returned with professionals, and Steffi Graf added the gold to her four majors: a Golden Slam.

A day after refusing Lehman, the Fed lent the world’s largest insurer up to 85 billion dollars for 79.9 per cent of its shares. AIG’s London unit had sold insurance against default on hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage securities, and its downgrade the night before had set off collateral…

Made mostly at Rockstar North in Edinburgh, the studio that began as DMA Design in Dundee. It took $1 billion in three days, faster than any film or game before it, and went on to sell over 200 million copies.