24 maggio

Edward III fought the first phase by raiding rather than conquest: mounted armies, the chevauchées, burned their way across France to ruin the French king’s revenue and dare him to fight. Twice he did, at Crécy and Poitiers, and lost both times. It ended with the Treaty of Brétigny.

When Charles IV died without a son on 1 February 1328, the French magnates passed over his nephew Edward III of England, grandson of Philip IV through his mother Isabella, and chose Philip of Valois, a cousin in the male line. Nine years later Philip declared Edward’s duchy of Gascony forfeit for…

A friend’s letter says a printed copy of his book reached him on the day he died. His grave in Frombork Cathedral was lost; bones found there in 2005 were identified by DNA matched to hairs left in a book he had owned.

Samuel Morse tapped out “What hath God wrought” from the Capitol to Baltimore. His dots and dashes outlived the wires: ships sent distress calls in Morse code until 1999.

On a line Congress had paid $30,000 to build, Morse sent a verse from the Book of Numbers from the Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol to Vail in Baltimore, about 40 miles away. The words were chosen by Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of the Commissioner of Patents.

Three enslaved men, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend, rowed to the Union fort. General Benjamin Butler refused to return them, calling them contraband of war. Thousands followed, and “contrabands” became the word for people who freed themselves by reaching Union lines.

A Royal Navy corvette with 15 of its 17 guns taken out to make room for laboratories sailed from Portsmouth under Captain George Nares, with Charles Wyville Thomson leading the scientists. In three and a half years it covered 68,890 nautical miles and sampled 362 stations. Its dredges brought up…

Lucy has had three proposals in one day: from Dr. Seward, from the Texan Quincey P. Morris, and from Arthur Holmwood, whom she accepts. Of Quincey’s she writes that he said her honesty “made me a friend”, and he asks only for one kiss. Of the third she says only that “both his arms were round me”…

Fought along the Alps and across the limestone plateau of the Carso. Italy attacked on the Isonzo eleven times in two and a half years for a few kilometres of ground before the twelfth battle, Caporetto, went the other way.

Women of 21 who were British subjects could vote in federal elections from 1 January 1919. Asian Canadians were excluded until 1947–48, status First Nations people until 1960, and Quebec women voted provincially only from 1940.

A secretary from Hull with a second-hand Gipsy Moth named Jason became the first woman to fly alone from England to Australia, in 19 and a half days, landing at Darwin.

As its chairman he signed a telegram appeal for funds to educate the public: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

Named after a river in the Soviet Far East so that even the troops would think they were going somewhere cold (some were issued skis and winter coats), Anadyr planned 24 R-12 and 16 R-14 launchers, surface-to-air missile batteries, Il-28 bombers, cruise missiles and about 50,000 men. Soldiers…

The Soviet leadership approved the deployment in principle and sent a delegation disguised as agricultural experts to put it to Castro, who accepted within days. The plan, Operation Anadyr, was signed off in July.

From the agreement signed at the Moscow summit to the splashdown of the last Apollo capsule: three years in which the rivals built a docking system both could use.

The agreement on cooperation in space, signed at the Moscow summit, named the date: an American and a Soviet spacecraft would dock in 1975.

Campion’s The Piano made her the first woman to win the Palme d’Or; Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine was the first Chinese-language winner. It was banned at home soon after.

Hindustan Motors built a lightly changed Morris Oxford near Kolkata for 56 years. In a closed economy with long waiting lists it was one of only a few cars Indians could buy, and the white Ambassador became the official car of ministers and civil servants.

Wiles received the Abel Prize in Oslo “for his stunning proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory.”