25 augustus

A princess of Dos Pilas, sent to refound Naranjo’s royal line after its defeat by Caracol. Her son became king at five years old, and she ruled for him, carved on stelae standing on a bound captive like any warrior king. Long Count 9.12.10.5.12 4 Eb 10 Yax

Louis IX of France sailed from Aigues-Mortes, the port he had built for it, wintered in Cyprus and took Damietta in a day. After the disaster in Egypt he stayed four years in the Holy Land, rebuilding the walls of Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa and Sidon.

He died of dysentery in his tent at Carthage, and his son Philip III took the army home. The Church canonized him in 1297.

He died as cheerfully as he had lived, without a deathbed conversion. Adam Smith wrote that he thought him “as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit”, and was attacked for it for years.

South Carolina and Georgia threatened to walk out. The convention barred Congress from banning the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years; Congress banned it on the first day it could.

Another bad night. At twelve there is “a sort of scratching or flapping at the window”, and in the morning her throat pains her and she is horribly weak.

German troops shot civilians and set fire to the Belgian university town over five days. The university library burned with some 230,000 books. Horne and Kramer count 6,427 civilians killed by the invading armies in Belgium and France in 1914.

A small steel-hulled tug of the Chilean Navy, commanded by Luis Pardo, quite unfit for the pack: Shackleton promised not to touch the ice. A southerly gale had opened a way to the island, and she slipped through.

With the Resistance already fighting in the streets, Leclerc’s French 2nd Armoured Division entered first, and the German commander, Dietrich von Choltitz, surrendered without carrying out Hitler’s order to destroy the city. De Gaulle spoke at the Hôtel de Ville that evening.

Taking a break outside the club where his name was on the marquee, Davis was told by a patrolman to move on, and refused. A detective clubbed him on the head, and he was arrested with blood soaking his suit. The charges were later dropped.

The first Summer Games shown on television across Europe. Wilma Rudolph, who had worn a leg brace as a child, won three sprint golds, and an 18-year-old Cassius Clay won the light heavyweight boxing.

Legasov led the Soviet delegation and spoke for about five hours to hundreds of experts. The report that followed, INSAG-1, laid the blame mainly on the operators.

Its closest pass of any planet, about 4,950 km over Neptune’s north pole. It found the Great Dark Spot, and nitrogen geysers erupting on the frozen moon Triton.

Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student, told a Usenet group he was writing a free operating system: just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu It now runs most of the world's servers, every Android phone and all 500 of the fastest supercomputers.

The last Great Observatory: an infrared telescope chilled with liquid helium, trailing the Earth around the Sun to stay clear of its warmth. It worked on for a decade after the coolant ran out, and in 2017 found seven Earth-sized planets around the star TRAPPIST-1.

About 121 times Earth’s distance from the Sun, Voyager 1 passed out of the bubble of solar wind into interstellar space. Scientists only agreed on the date a year later, from the pitch of plasma waves set ringing by a solar outburst.

The Africa Regional Certification Commission declared the region free of wild poliovirus, four years after the last case in Nigeria’s Borno state. Wild polio is now endemic in only two countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan.