24 novembre

At this k’atun ending Ceibal’s king Wat’ul K’atel named lords of Tikal, Calakmul and Motul de San José as his witnesses. Ceibal, where the lowlands’ first ceremonial plaza had been laid out 1,850 years before, was briefly one of the last great cities of the south. Long Count 10.1.0.0.0 5 Ajaw 3…

A great fleet came up the Seine wanting passage to raid Burgundy upriver, and Paris, on its island behind two fortified bridges, refused. Abbo, a monk inside the walls, counted 700 ships, surely too many. Count Odo held out for eleven months; then Emperor Charles the Fat came, paid, and let the…

To pay the Venetians, the army took the Christian port of Zara for them from the king of Hungary, who had taken the cross himself. Innocent III excommunicated them, then lifted it from all but the Venetians.

Genghis caught the Shah’s son Jalal al-Din with his back to the river. Jalal al-Din rode his horse off the bank into the Indus and swam across; Juvaini says Genghis held him up to his own sons as the kind of son a father should have.

Jeremiah Horrocks, about 20, had corrected Kepler’s tables and predicted the transit. He projected the Sun on a card, and the clouds broke about half an hour before sunset. Only he and his friend William Crabtree, near Manchester, ever saw it.

Where to winter? The captains polled the whole party, and Clark wrote down York’s vote and Sacagawea’s with the rest. She wanted “a place where there is plenty of Potas”, the wapato roots. Most chose to cross to the south shore, where the Clatsop said the elk were.

John Murray printed 1,250 copies at fifteen shillings, and booksellers had asked for more than that at his trade sale two days before, so the first printing was gone before publication day. The word “evolution” does not appear in it until the sixth edition of 1872, though the book ends on “evolved”.

Joseph Hooker’s men climbed Lookout Mountain in fog and drove its Confederate defenders off. Next morning the Stars and Stripes flew from the summit.

A Fokker F.VII flown by Van der Hoop landed in Batavia after leaving Amsterdam on 1 October, the first flight between the Netherlands and its colony. A new engine had to be shipped to it in Bulgaria. KLM, founded in 1919, is the oldest airline still flying under its own name.

No more tours, no deadlines, and as much time in EMI’s studios as they wanted. With George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick they made the studio an instrument; Sgt. Pepper alone took about 700 hours.

Alexander Dubček, leader of the 1968 Prague Spring, stood beside Havel on the Melantrich balcony above Wenceslas Square for the first time in twenty years. That evening party leader Miloš Jakeš and the whole Presidium resigned.