29 giugno

The last and best recorded: an itinerary preserved by Zhu Yunming gives the day of each arrival and departure. The fleet carried more than 27,000 men, reached Hormuz, and sent squadrons to Aden, Mecca, Bengal and the African coast.

During Henry VIII, a cannon fired for the king’s entrance set light to the thatch, and the house burned to the ground in under an hour. Sir Henry Wotton wrote that no one was hurt: only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a…

Built on Bankside in 1599 from the Theatre’s timbers, owned by the Burbages and five of the actors, Shakespeare among them: players owning their own playhouse was new. It was open to the sky, with a thatched roof over the galleries.

New duties on glass, lead, paint, paper and tea, collected at the ports, with the revenue paying royal governors and judges so they no longer depended on colonial assemblies.

Sheltering from a storm in a ravine above the falls, Clark, Charbonneau and Sacagawea with her baby were caught by a wall of water. Clark pushed them up the bank; the water reached his waist before he got out. Sacagawea had time only to grasp her child; the cradleboard and all its clothes were…

The Count tells Harker: “To-morrow, my friend, we must part.” He opens the door to wolves at Harker’s asking to leave at once, shuts it when Harker cries out that he will wait until morning, and afterwards drives the three women from Harker’s door with “To-night is mine. To-morrow night is yours!”

A board of consulting engineers had voted 8 to 5 for a sea-level canal. Stevens and the minority argued for locks and a lake, which would be cheaper and quicker. The Senate agreed by 36 votes to 31 and Roosevelt signed the act.

A team of part-timers beat the side that called itself the best in the world. The goal was a header by Joe Gaetjens, a Haitian student who was not yet a US citizen.

Adopted by the International Labour Conference this day; in force from 1953. It commits ratifying states to equal pay for men and women for work of equal value, not only for identical work. It is one of the most widely ratified ILO conventions.

President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act while recovering from surgery at Walter Reed. It paid nine-tenths of the cost of a national network of four-lane motorways. As a young officer in 1919 he had crossed the country in an Army convoy that took 62 days.

Pelé, 17 years old, scored twice, and Brazil became the first team to win a World Cup outside its own continent. He is still the youngest player to score in a final.

All four British nations qualified, the only time they have. France’s Just Fontaine scored 13 goals in six matches, a record for one tournament that still stands.

As their capsule separated for re-entry a valve jolted open and the air leaked into space. Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev wore no spacesuits; the recovery team found them in their seats. They are the only people to have died in space.

Argentina led 2–0; West Germany drew level in the last quarter of an hour. Six minutes from the end Maradona’s pass sent Jorge Burruchaga through to win it.

Colombia gave the tournament up, and Mexico became the first country to host twice. The earthquake that struck Mexico City in September 1985 left the stadiums standing, and the tournament went ahead.

STS-71, under Robert “Hoot” Gibson, was the hundredth American human spaceflight. Docked, the two made the largest spacecraft yet put in orbit, about 225 tonnes, twenty years after Apollo and Soyuz had met.

The 1,142-kilometre line from Golmud to Lhasa crosses the Tanggula Pass at 5,072 metres, the highest railway in the world, and runs for hundreds of kilometres on permafrost, kept frozen with cooling pipes and raised track. The carriages are pumped with oxygen. Critics saw the line as a way to tie…

While Bush was sedated for a colonoscopy at Camp David, Dick Cheney was acting president for about two hours. Bush did the same again in 2007.

A quarter point at every meeting since June 2004 had taken the federal funds rate from 1 per cent to 5.25 per cent. Adjustable-rate mortgages reset upwards with it.

Built by employees of the Los Angeles marketing firm eUniverse, Myspace let users paint their pages with any HTML they liked and gave bands a home: every new member’s first friend was co-founder Tom Anderson. Facebook passed it in 2008, and in June 2011 News Corp sold it to Specific Media for…

A century after Ottavio Bottecchia became the first Italian winner, Florence gave Italy its first Grand Départ, in the 111th edition of the race.