3 septembre

Altar Q, carved some 350 years later, says he received the royal sceptre on this day, far from Copán, and shows all sixteen kings of his line seated round its sides. His bones, found under the Acropolis, show that he grew up far away, most likely in the central Petén. Long Count 8.19.10.10.17 5…

With Hülegü gone east, his general Kitbuqa met the Mamluks of Egypt under Qutuz and Baybars at the spring of Goliath in Galilee. Kitbuqa was killed. It was the first great Mongol defeat that was never avenged: Syria stayed Mamluk.

A voyage to take home the envoys who had come for the new capital’s inauguration, sixteen countries in all. The fleet split into squadrons for Aden, Dhofar and Africa.

John Evelyn watched from Bankside and wrote that the smoke reached “near fifty miles in length”. The noise & crackling & thunder of the impetuous flames, the shreeking of Women & children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses & churches, was like an hideous storme. — John Evelyn

England was at war with the Dutch and the French, and weeks earlier an English raid had burned the Dutch town of West-Terschelling. Rumour said the fire was their revenge. Crowds beat Frenchmen and Dutchmen in the streets, and the Duke of York’s guards took some into custody for their own safety.

The fire spread north and west through the merchants’ quarter, and the roads out of the City jammed with carts. Prices for a cart rose to £40 or more as people paid anything to get their goods away.

With the Lord Mayor overwhelmed, Charles II put his brother James in command. James set up fire posts around the blaze, each manned by constables, soldiers and gentlemen courtiers, and rode between them all week.

Thomas Gresham’s trading hall, the commercial heart of the City, burned on Monday. When Pepys walked through two days later, nothing stood of all its statues and pillars but “Sir Thomas Gresham’s picture in the corner”.

About four o’clock in the morning, my Lady Batten sent me a cart to carry away all my money, and plate, and best things, to Sir W. Rider’s at Bednall-greene. Which I did riding myself in my night-gowne in the cart. Diary entry: 3 September 1666

Eight years from Lexington to the peace treaty. Howard Peckham counted 6,824 Americans killed in action; with disease and the prison ships added, estimates of all American military deaths run to about 25,000.

John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay won recognition of independence and a border on the Mississippi. Britain signed away land its Native allies still held without naming them, and signed separate treaties that day at Versailles, in which Spain regained Florida.

About 140 chemists met to agree on atomic weights and failed. But Stanislao Cannizzaro's pamphlet, handed out at the end, used Avogadro's hypothesis to give one consistent set. Lothar Meyer said the scales fell from his eyes; Mendeleev, aged 26, was in the hall.

The shōguns’ city was renamed Tōkyō, “eastern capital”. The emperor entered it that November and moved there for good the next year, taking over the shōguns’ castle as his palace. Japanese calendar: Keiō 4, 7th month, 17th day

Van Helsing has examined Lucy, finds “no functional cause”, and gives no more: “there is cause; there is always cause for everything.” He goes back to Amsterdam to think and asks for a telegram every day.

A small steel-hulled tug of the Chilean Navy, commanded by Luis Pardo, quite unfit for the pack: Shackleton promised not to touch the ice. A southerly gale had opened a way to the island, and she slipped through.

The high of the boom. It would take 25 years to see it again.

Britain’s ultimatum ran out at 11 in the morning, and Chamberlain told the country on the radio a quarter of an hour later. France followed that afternoon. Neither could help Poland, and the quiet months that followed in the west became the Phoney War.

The longest continuous campaign of the war, fought over the convoys that fed Britain and later carried an American army to Europe. It started on the first evening, when U-30 sank the liner Athenia, and it hinged on code-breaking by both sides.

His mother, Mamie Till Bradley (later Mamie Till-Mobley), insisted on an open casket so that people could see what had been done to her son. Tens of thousands filed past it, and Jet magazine printed photographs of his body that a generation of Black Americans never forgot.

It began in the Vaal Triangle on the day the new constitution came into force, over rent increases set by black town councils that residents saw as puppets. Councillors were attacked, schools boycotted, and townships declared “ungovernable”. The army was sent into the townships.