17 luglio

The young Alexios Angelos promised 200,000 marks to put his deposed father back on the throne. The Venetians stormed the Golden Horn walls, the usurper fled, and Isaac II was restored the next day. The promised money never came.

Zhu Di took the reign name Yongle, “perpetual happiness”. He moved the capital to Beijing, sent five campaigns into Mongolia, and sent six of the seven fleets to show the world the Ming had a new and rightful emperor.

Joan of Arc had broken the siege of Orléans in May and led the Dauphin through English-held country to the coronation church. She stood by the altar with her banner during the anointing.

Joan and the army took Charles through Burgundian country to the cathedral where French kings were anointed. Crowned there, the Dauphin became a king in French eyes; Henry VI, uncrowned, never matched it. Joan stood by the altar with her standard.

Told that the French were abandoning their siege camp outside Castillon, Talbot attacked it and ran into Jean Bureau’s entrenched guns, which cut down the columns at close range. Talbot, in his sixties, was unhorsed and killed with his son, Viscount Lisle. It was the last battle of the war, and…

George I went up the river by barge from Whitehall to Chelsea on a summer evening, and about fifty musicians followed in a second barge playing Handel’s new suites. The Daily Courant reported that the king liked it so well that he had it played three times over, going and returning.

Crowds pressed to change small notes for coin at the bank, and fifteen to seventeen people died in the crush. Accounts differ on the count, and some put the deaths in the Rue Quincampoix nearby.

The Duke of Bridgewater wanted his Worsley coal in Manchester. His engineer James Brindley carried the canal over the River Irwell on the Barton Aqueduct, and boats sailed straight into the mines at Worsley. The price of coal in Manchester roughly halved.

A crowd gathered to sign a petition against the king. The mayor, Bailly, declared martial law and Lafayette’s National Guard opened fire, killing perhaps a dozen to fifty people. Bailly was guillotined for it in 1793.

At the eyepiece of Harvard’s 15-inch Great Refractor, then equal largest in the world, the daguerreotypist John Adams Whipple and William Cranch Bond exposed a plate for 100 seconds and caught Vega. Photography would soon replace the astronomer’s eye and pencil.

One of the crew, Olgaren, tells the captain he saw “a tall, thin man” come up from below and walk forward before vanishing. The captain has the whole ship searched stem to stern with lanterns, but among the great boxes there is nowhere for a man to hide.

Delegates from seventeen national federations met after the Stockholm Olympics to found the International Amateur Athletic Federation. It set the rules for what counts as a record, and its first list, approved in 1914, is where the official mile progression begins.

A Julian date: 17 July in Russia, 30 July in the West. Nicholas II agreed at Peterhof after a day of wavering, and Germany, whose war plan depended on striking France before Russia was ready, declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on 3 August.

Germany’s summer offensive aimed at the oil of the Caucasus and reached the Volga. The Sixth Army fought for the city street by street, factory by factory, until the defenders held only a strip along the river bank. The Soviet counter-stroke turned the besiegers into the besieged.

Emilio Segrè’s group found that reactor-made plutonium fissions on its own far too often for a gun bomb. The leaders dropped the plutonium gun, and Los Alamos was reorganised around implosion: a shell of explosive lenses squeezing a plutonium sphere.

Sweden stayed out of the war and kept racing. Two Swedes set or equalled the mile record six times in three years, from 4:06.2 to 4:01.4, often against each other in front of full stadiums.

Hägg had the last word, with Andersson behind him. He was timed in 4:01.3, rounded up to 4:01.4, and the time stood for almost nine years.

Almost nine years at 4:01.4 made four minutes look like a wall, and the idea that the human body could not go under it spread with every year the record held.

Truman, Stalin and Churchill met in the Crown Prince’s palace outside Berlin. Midway through, Churchill lost the British election and Clement Attlee took his place at the table.

Elaine and Louis Lorillard, of the Newport tobacco family, hired the Boston club owner George Wein to put on two nights of jazz on the lawn of the Newport Casino, with Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie and the Modern Jazz Quartet. It was the first major outdoor festival devoted to jazz in America,…

A few minutes of Monk’s ballad on muted trumpet, played in a jam set, won Davis a contract with Columbia. Within months he had formed his quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones.

She had lost her New York cabaret card after a drug conviction in 1947. Dying of liver and heart disease at 44, she was arrested for narcotics possession in her hospital bed and kept under police guard until she died.

Thirteen months.

At nineteen, Ryun took 2.3 seconds off Jazy’s record, the biggest cut since Elliott.

Almost nine years over his two records, longer than anyone before him.

He died of liver cancer at 40, eight years to the day after Billie Holiday. Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler played at his funeral.

Thomas Stafford and Alexei Leonov, the first spacewalker, shook hands through the open hatch. The crews shared meals and swapped gifts, and Deke Slayton, grounded since 1962 as one of the Mercury Seven, finally flew.

Montreal 1976Olympic Stadium

A Games remembered for its bill: the Olympic Stadium’s cost overruns left Quebec with a debt it took thirty years to pay off, and the stadium its nickname, the Big O.

Four Summer Games in a row were cut short of the full world: Africa walked out of Montreal, the West stayed away from Moscow, the East from Los Angeles, and North Korea and a handful of allies from Seoul.

Two Britons who avoided racing each other passed the record back and forth five times in six years, and three times in nine days in August 1981.

Coe’s second world record in twelve days, at the Golden Mile at Bislett; a month later he added the 1500 metres.

Almost four years. Walker won the Olympic 1500 metres in Montreal in 1976, and in 1985 became the first man to run a hundred miles under four minutes.

Havelange had won FIFA’s presidency on votes from Africa and Asia and repaid them with places: 24 teams from 1982, and two African qualifiers instead of one.

The first final to finish goalless, and the first decided on penalties. Roberto Baggio, who had carried Italy to the final, put the last one over the bar.

A World Cup in a country with no professional league; FIFA made the US promise to found one. 3.59 million people watched the 52 matches, a record for any World Cup until 2026. Diego Maradona was sent home after a failed drug test.

The SKY Proleague StarCraft final drew a crowd put at about 100,000 to the beach at Busan, for a video game played on a stage by two sponsored teams.