22 giugno

With a sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the above-mentioned errors and heresies — Galileo Kneeling in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, he heard himself sentenced to prison, commuted to house arrest. The defiant “Eppur si muove” (“and yet it moves”)…

James Somerset, brought to London from Virginia, escaped, was recaptured and put on a ship for Jamaica. Lord Mansfield ruled that he could not be forced out of England. The ruling did not end slavery in England, but it was widely read as if it had. It’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to…

The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, brought in by the mill owner Sir Robert Peel, limited pauper apprentices to twelve hours a day and required some schooling. It named no inspectors and was widely ignored.

Hitler had the railway carriage in which Germany signed the armistice of 1918 brought out of its museum and set on the same spot in the forest. Germany occupied the north and the Atlantic coast; Pétain’s government at Vichy kept the south.

Some three million German troops, with Romanian and Finnish armies alongside, attacked on a front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Stalin had ignored repeated warnings. By December the Germans had taken millions of prisoners and stood outside Moscow.

The largest and bloodiest land war in history. Most of the German army fought and died here. The Soviet Union lost, by the National WWII Museum’s figures, 8.8 to 10.7 million soldiers and about 24 million people in all.

A small garrison held the hill town on the road to India against a Japanese division. The fiercest fighting was hand to hand across the tennis court of the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow, whose lines are still marked in the war cemetery there.

Three years to the day after Barbarossa, the Red Army struck in Belorussia and in weeks destroyed Army Group Centre, a worse German defeat than Stalingrad. On 17 July some 57,000 German prisoners were marched through Moscow.

The last great battle of the war, on Japanese soil, and the costliest of the Pacific. Kamikazes sank or damaged hundreds of ships offshore. Estimates of Okinawan civilians killed run from about 40,000 to 150,000, many of them driven to suicide.

Their first professional record, produced by the bandleader Bert Kaempfert for Polydor in a school hall in Harburg. Polydor thought “Beat Brothers” easier for German audiences to follow, so the single credited Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers.

The only match the two German states ever played. Jürgen Sparwasser scored; both went through, and the defeat left the hosts an easier second round.

Four years after the Falklands War. In the 51st minute Diego Maradona punched the ball in; four minutes later he ran from his own half through the England team to score what a FIFA poll in 2002 named the Goal of the Century. Un poco con la cabeza de Maradona y otro poco con la mano de Dios. (A…