26 febbraio

Willem Janszoon charted the west coast of Cape York, taking it for part of New Guinea. It is the first recorded European landing in Australia, and it ended in a fight with the local people.

Fourteen states, and no African one, set rules for claiming the coast of Africa and recognised Leopold II’s claim to the Congo. It did not draw the map, but it started the scramble in earnest.

A strip of American territory cutting Panama in two, with its own governor, police, courts and schools. Resentment of it grew into riots in January 1964, and the zone was abolished under the 1977 treaties.

Five white New Orleans musicians led by the cornetist Nick LaRocca, a sensation at Reisenweber’s Café since January, recorded “Livery Stable Blues”, with a cornet that whinnied and a clarinet that crowed, and “Dixie Jass Band One-Step” for Victor. It sold strongly and is usually called the first…

On Sunday afternoon the training detachment of the Volynsky Regiment fired into the crowd, killing about 40. That evening a company of the Pavlovsky Regiment mutinied rather than do the same, and was disarmed.

Robert Wiene’s tale of a sleepwalking murderer, told on sets where the light and shadows were painted onto the canvas: crooked streets, slanted windows. German Expressionism’s moody look travelled to Hollywood with the émigrés of the 1930s and fed film noir.

Armstrong sang a chorus of nonsense syllables. The legend, which he told himself, is that he dropped the lyric sheet; either way the record made scat singing famous and sold well among Black record buyers.

Two weeks after the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini’s office announced that the law was void as contrary to Islam. Family courts closed and men regained the right to divorce without going to court. The minimum marriage age for girls, lowered to puberty, was raised to 13 in 2002.

The Majlis passed it in 1967 and strengthened it in 1975. Divorce went to family courts, where a wife could also seek one; a man needed a court’s permission to take a second wife; and the 1975 law raised the minimum marriage age for girls to 18.

Dubai dug a port out of the desert coast, far bigger than its trade at the time. Jebel Ali became the busiest container port between Singapore and Rotterdam and home to DP World.