7 luglio

A retrial authorised by Pope Callixtus III, and wanted by Charles VII, whose crown she had helped win, heard 115 witnesses, among them her mother. In the archbishop’s palace at Rouen it declared the 1431 sentence null and void. The Church canonised her in 1920.

A week into their retreat to Tlaxcala, the survivors met a Mexica army on the plain. By the Spanish accounts, a charge at its commander, who carried the army’s standard, broke it, and the Spaniards reached Tlaxcala, where their allies took them in.

Ranjit Singh took Lahore at eighteen and built a kingdom from Kashmir to Peshawar with a European-drilled army. Ten years after his death the Company annexed it, and the Koh-i-Noor went to Queen Victoria.

The Lumières’ operator Marius Sestier showed six films at Watson’s Hotel, barely six months after Paris. The travelling operators the Lumières sent out took cinema to every inhabited continent within a year or two, filming local scenes as they went.

A Japanese unit on night manoeuvres near Wanping, south-west of Beijing, reported a soldier missing and demanded to search the town. The soldier turned up, but the firing that night between Japanese and Chinese troops grew within weeks into full-scale war, although neither side declared it.

China fought Japan alone for four and a half years before Pearl Harbor, and kept more than half a million Japanese troops tied down to the end. The National WWII Museum puts Chinese deaths at about 20 million; Rana Mitter gives at least 14 million. Japanese forces in China formally surrendered at…

Ngô Đình Diệm, a Catholic nationalist who had spent the war abroad, became prime minister under the former emperor Bảo Đại and then president of a new Republic of Vietnam. He broke the sects and gangs of Saigon, refused the elections Geneva had promised, and governed through his family, above all…

Near midnight, Paul Gonsalves played 27 choruses of tenor saxophone in the middle of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”, and the crowd rose and danced. The live album became the best-selling of Ellington’s career, and a month later he was on the cover of Time.

Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron, simulated on an IBM 704, learned to tell cards marked on the left from cards marked on the right. The next day’s New York Times reported it as the “embryo of an electronic computer” that the Navy expected would one day walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be…

The Dutch scored a penalty in the second minute, before a German had touched the ball. Gerd Müller’s winner was his 14th World Cup goal, a record for 32 years.

The first tournament for the new trophy, Silvio Gazzaniga’s gold figures holding up the globe. Johan Cruyff’s Netherlands played Total Football, and just before it began Brazil’s João Havelange was elected FIFA’s first non-European president.

Rakim rapped cool and unhurried, packing rhymes inside lines rather than only at their ends, where earlier MCs had shouted. Rappers still cite him as the moment the MC became a technician.

Six men were tried in the town's House of Culture. The director Viktor Bryukhanov, the chief engineer Nikolai Fomin and Dyatlov each got ten years; the others two to five. The reactor's design was not on trial.

At the eleventh International AIDS Conference, researchers showed that three drugs together could push the virus below detection for months. David Ho argued for treating “early and hard”. In the United States AIDS deaths fell by almost half the next year.

Twenty-seven years and eleven days, the longest reign since the IAAF began keeping the record.

At the Golden Gala. Noah Ngeny of Kenya, second in 3:43.40, also ran under Morceli’s old record. El Guerrouj’s time stood for twenty-seven years.

Nearly six years. Morceli won the Olympic 1500 metres in Atlanta in 1996.

At Southwest Research Institute a gas gun fired a block of foam the size of the one that fell, at the speed it hit, into a real panel 8. It blew a hole about 41 by 43 centimetres, ending any doubt that foam could break the wing.