8 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.

Edward gave up his claim to the French crown; in return he was to hold an enlarged Aquitaine, Calais and Ponthieu in full sovereignty, and John’s ransom was set at three million gold écus. When the kings ratified it at Calais on 24 October, the two renunciations were moved into a side agreement…

Orléans was the last great town on the Loire that held for Charles VII. The English commander, the Earl of Salisbury, was mortally wounded by a cannon shot at a window of the Tourelles fort in the first weeks. His successors ringed the city with forts but never closed it off.

In four days the French took the English forts one after another. Joan was wounded by an arrow above the breast at the assault on the Tourelles on 7 May and went back to the fight. The next morning the English drew up, faced the city, and marched away.

A new Act of Supremacy made Elizabeth I Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and the Act of Uniformity restored a Protestant prayer book. Every Catholic bishop in the Lords voted against it, and the Uniformity bill passed by only three votes.

The People’s Charter asked for six things, starting with a vote for every man and a secret ballot. Parliament rejected petitions in 1839, 1842 and 1848, the second signed by more than three million people. The movement faded after a mass meeting on Kennington Common in April 1848.

Two weeks of assaults on entrenchments. “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” Grant wrote to Washington. 30,000 casualties (NPS).

Found in the Temple of Hera, right where Pausanias had seen it seventeen centuries earlier: Hermes holding the infant Dionysus.

While Harker shaves, the Count stands behind him and casts no reflection in the glass. The Count flings the shaving glass out of the window and almost grips his throat, but draws back when his hand touches the crucifix. Harker has still seen the Count neither eat nor drink, and exploring the…

The Count tells the history of his people, speaking of its battles as if he had fought them: “We Szekelys have a right to be proud.” He says “we” of his house, and claims Attila’s blood. He speaks of a Dracula who, as Voivode, crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground. He says the…

For the better food and quarters at Cape Evans, Aeneas Mackintosh and Victor Hayward set out about 1 p.m. to walk there over young sea ice, against advice. A blizzard was blowing by three. Their tracks ended at open water; neither was seen again.

At 12.30 p.m. McCarthy glimpsed the cliffs through a rift in the clouds. A hurricane then kept them off the lee shore for a day and a night; the same storm, they learned later, sank a 500-ton steamer bound for South Georgia from Buenos Aires.

The longest continuous campaign of the war, fought over the convoys that fed Britain and later carried an American army to Europe. It started on the first evening, when U-30 sank the liner Athenia, and it hinged on code-breaking by both sides.

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.

Five years and eight months from the invasion of Poland to Germany’s unconditional surrender. At its height in 1942 Germany and its allies held Europe from the Atlantic coast of France to the Volga, and from Norway’s North Cape to Crete.

Crowds filled the streets of London, Paris and New York. Stalin insisted on a signing of his own: Field Marshal Keitel signed again at Karlshorst late that night, when it was already 9 May in Moscow, and so Russia marks Victory Day on 9 May.

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.

On the Buddha’s birthday government forces broke up a crowd protesting a ban on flying the Buddhist flag, with gunfire and grenades, and nine people died. Months of Buddhist protest against a Catholic-led government followed.

Resolution WHA33.3 declared that “the world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox”, the first human disease wiped out, as Jenner had predicted in 1801. D. A. Henderson put its toll in the twentieth century alone at about 300 million deaths; other estimates run to 500 million.

Citing security fears and “anti-Soviet hysteria”, Moscow pulled out, and fourteen countries of the Eastern Bloc and its allies stayed home. Romania defied the boycott and came second in the medal table.

Fearing that molten fuel would reach the flooded pools under the reactor and cause a steam explosion, three plant workers, Oleksiy Ananenko, Valeriy Bezpalov and Borys Baranov, waded through the basement to open the drain valves; fire-brigade pumps had emptied the basement by 8 May. Reports that…