17 agosto

Bedford destroyed a Franco-Scottish army in the bloodiest battle of the Lancastrian war, a “second Agincourt”. The Scots, who had asked for no quarter, were almost wiped out, with the Earls of Douglas and Buchan among the dead.

As the Shoshone rode up to Clark’s party, Sacagawea “danced for the joyful Sight”. In the council that followed she recognised the chief: Cameahwait was her brother. The Shoshone sold them the horses they needed; the captains named the place Camp Fortunate. It lies under Clark Canyon Reservoir.

Through the canyon Lewis called the Gates of the Rocky Mountains, past the Three Forks and up the Jefferson and the Beaverhead, the men dragging the canoes up shallows by hand. They needed Shoshone horses to cross the mountains, and had not yet seen a Shoshone.

Charbonneau was paid $500.33⅓ for his services, a horse and a lodge. Sacagawea was paid nothing. Clark offered to raise their son, and they agreed to bring him to St. Louis once he was weaned. The Mandan chief Sheheke, Big White, came downriver with his family to meet Jefferson. Fighting with the…

Private Colter asked to leave with two trappers, Joseph Dickson and Forrest Hancock, heading upriver. The captains let him go. He was the first of the mountain men: the expedition’s reports of beaver sent St. Louis fur companies up the Missouri from the next spring.

Billington & Son send the carriers an invoice for the goods that leave by the Great Northern Railway: fifty boxes, to be deposited “in the partially ruined building” at Carfax, near Purfleet, which “is the ancient chapel of the mansion”. They are due at King’s Cross at 4:30 the next afternoon, and…

Mina has not had the heart to write for two days. Lucy is fading: the roses fade from her cheeks, she gasps for air at night and Mina finds her in a faint at the open window, but she eats and sleeps well.

A car giving demonstration rides in the grounds of the Crystal Palace struck Bridget Driscoll, 44, who had come up from Croydon with her daughter. The driver said he was going about four miles an hour; a witness said it came at “a reckless pace”. The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death,…

A war of movement over a front far longer than the Western: Russia invaded East Prussia and Austrian Galicia in 1914, lost Poland in 1915 and nearly broke Austria-Hungary in 1916. After two revolutions the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, giving up Poland, the Baltic…

Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India before, drew the borders through Punjab and Bengal in five weeks. They were kept secret until two days after independence, so millions learned only then which country they lived in.

Not the focused ten-man study the proposal described: people came and went over about eight weeks, and no joint result came out of it. But the field got its name there. McCarthy and Minsky stayed for most of the summer; Newell and Simon came for the first fortnight and brought the one program that…

Its sales never stopped: the RIAA certified it five times platinum in 2019, and for decades it was called the best-selling jazz album of all time, smooth jazz aside. In August 2026 Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas passed it at six times platinum. Side one ran slightly off pitch, from a…

A strip club off the Reeperbahn, turned music club. The band had signed up their drummer, Pete Best, days before leaving, and slept in a storeroom behind a cinema screen, the Bambi Kino. Neighbours’ complaints about the noise closed the Indra to music within two months.

A lander built to survive 180 atmospheres, on a guess about Venus that its predecessors had kept getting wrong.

PolyGram’s new plant at Langenhagen, a few kilometres from where Berliner’s family had pressed shellac 84 years before, began making compact discs. The first was ABBA’s The Visitors.