9 april

A northern wing under Baidar and Qadan destroyed the army of Duke Henry II of Silesia. Henry was killed and his head was paraded on a spear before the town. Two days later, and 500 kilometres away, the main army fought at Mohi.

A denunciation dropped into one of the city’s boxes for anonymous charges accused a seventeen-year-old goldsmith’s apprentice, Jacopo Saltarelli, of sodomy with four men, Leonardo among them. No witness came forward, and on 7 June 1476 the charges were dismissed on condition that no further…

Playing stopped as the queen lay dying, and the worst plague of the age followed: some 30,000 Londoners died in 1603. The King’s Men toured and played for James at Wilton House and Hampton Court until the Privy Council let the playhouses open again.

About ten seconds of someone singing the French folk song: the oldest recognisable recording of a human voice, made seventeen years before Edison’s phonograph. It lay in the archive of the Académie des sciences until 2008. First played back too fast, it sounded like a girl; at the right speed it…

From the first shot at Fort Sumter to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The traditional count of the dead, about 620,000, goes back to William Fox and Thomas Livermore’s tallies. J. David Hacker’s 2011 census-based estimate is about 750,000, roughly as many as in all the nation’s other wars combined.

In Wilmer McLean’s parlour Grant wrote generous terms: officers kept their side arms, and men who owned horses took them home for the spring ploughing. 27,805 Confederates were paroled (NPS). McLean had moved there from Manassas, where his farm had been part of the first battlefield.

Grant broke through at Petersburg and chased Lee’s starving army west, heading it off from the railroad and the supplies waiting on it. Lee had eleven days of war left.

Appomattox did not end the war at once. Confederate armies, departments and one cruiser surrendered one by one over seven months, the last of them in England.

Three and a half months of waiting for the floe to drift north and the ice to open. They lived on seal and penguin, burned blubber, and in the end shot and ate the last of the dogs. Paulet Island passed out of reach to the west.

When the floe split under the camp they launched the James Caird, Dudley Docker and Stancomb Wills, named after the expedition’s backers. Six days and nights in open boats, soaked and frostbitten, short of drinking water; several men were delirious by the end.

For the first time all four Canadian divisions attacked together, behind a carefully rehearsed creeping barrage, and took most of the ridge on the first day. It became a founding story of Canadian nationhood.

Germany let 32 Russian émigrés, Lenin among them, cross its territory from Switzerland in a carriage treated as extraterritorial, hoping they would take Russia out of the war. The journey ran by rail to the Baltic, by ferry to Sweden and round the Gulf of Bothnia to Finland: eight days. It starts…

Brian Trubshaw flew the British prototype from Filton, where it was built, to the test airfield at RAF Fairford, and said on landing: It was wizard — a cool, calm and collected operation. — Brian Trubshaw

The South Vietnamese 18th Division, under General Lê Minh Đảo, held the crossroads town 60 kilometres from Saigon for twelve days against several divisions. It was the last great stand of the Republic’s army; the North went around it.

Zuckerberg agreed the deal over a weekend for an app with thirteen employees and no revenue, in cash and stock. Facebook’s shares fell after its flotation, so by the time the deal closed it was worth about $715 million.