15 maggio

Francesc Vicent’s book of a hundred chess problems, printed in Valencia, appears to be the first printed book on the new rules. No copy survives: the last known one was in the library of the abbey of Montserrat, lost when French troops sacked the monastery in 1811.

The princes’ army routed the Thuringian peasants gathered around the preacher Thomas Müntzer, who had promised that God would catch the cannonballs in their sleeves. Thousands of peasants were killed. Müntzer was found hiding in the town, tortured, and beheaded outside Mühlhausen on 27 May.

The jury of the official Salon turned away more than half of the works sent in that year, and after the protests Napoleon III ordered the rejected pictures shown in another part of the same building. Crowds came to jeer. The scandal was Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, then called Le Bain: a naked…

Monet, Renoir and Sisley stayed away from the eighth and last group exhibition. The sensation was Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, three metres wide and built from small touches of unmixed colour meant to blend in the eye. The critic Félix Fénéon named the method neo-impressionism…

Eight years of digging toward a sea-level canal that the Chagres floods, the Culebra slides and disease made impossible. The company switched to locks in 1887, too late. It spent about $287 million, well over a billion francs, before it failed. Work on the isthmus stopped on 15 May 1889. Machines…

No one kept a full count. The figure usually given is about 22,000 deaths from 1881 to 1889, William Gorgas’s estimate, repeated by David McCullough. Gorgas reached it by applying a death rate to the estimated workforce, because he judged the records incomplete. The company’s hospitals recorded…

With the Count gone down the wall again, Harker tries every door; the front door is locked and its key is missing. One door gives under pressure and opens on rooms that were once the ladies’ wing, where he sits at an old oak table: “It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet,…

They sailed the boat to the head of the bay and turned her over on the beach as a shelter, “Peggotty Camp” after the boat-house in David Copperfield. The whaling stations were on the far side of the island, across unmapped mountains; the boat would not survive the sea passage round.

With Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen he argued that if quantum mechanics were complete, measuring one particle would instantly fix a property of another far away, what he later called “spooky action at a distance”. Experiments since the 1970s show the effect is real; the 2022 Nobel Prize was for…

In under eight weeks, after Germany occupied its wavering ally, Hungarian police and Adolf Eichmann’s office deported about 440,000 Jews to Auschwitz. Most were gassed on arrival at Birkenau.

Charlie Parker, Miles Davis with Tadd Dameron, Kenny Clarke and Sidney Bechet played the Salle Pleyel. Davis fell for the singer Juliette Gréco and found himself treated as an artist rather than a Black man; he went home depressed. Clarke later settled in Paris, and Bechet moved to France for good.

Korolev’s single-seat capsule was a sphere with an ejection seat: the pilot bailed out at about 7 km and came down under his own parachute. Test flights with dogs, then six crewed flights, four of them in pairs.

The last and longest Mercury flight: 22 orbits in 34 hours. Near the end a short circuit killed the automatic controls, and Cooper flew re-entry by hand, lining up on the horizon through the window and timing the burn on his wristwatch. He splashed down within sight of the recovery carrier.

South Africa had been kept out of the Tokyo and Mexico City Games over its all-white teams. At its session in Amsterdam the International Olympic Committee expelled it outright. The sports boycott became the sanction white South Africans felt most.