15 december

He left the empire at its greatest extent since Justinian, from Armenia to southern Italy, and a treasury Psellos put at 200,000 talents. He had never married, and no heir of his own followed.

Back to Milan for a royal wedding: the Empress’s son Archduke Ferdinand was marrying Maria Beatrice d’Este, and Wolfgang had a festive serenata to write. Leopold hoped the Archduke would take his son into service.

The Bill of Rights is ratifiedBill of Rights

Virginia’s vote made ten of the twelve amendments law. Of the other two, one on congressional pay was ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Georgia only ratified the Bill of Rights, symbolically, in 1939.

Ambrose Burnside crossed the Rappahannock under fire on pontoon bridges and threw his army at Lee’s prepared lines. 17,929 casualties (NPS), 13,353 of them Union.

George Thomas attacked Hood’s thinned army outside the city and destroyed it as a fighting force. Two brigades of Black troops took part. 6,602 casualties (NPS).

The American occupation ordered Japan to stop funding and teaching Shinto as a state cult. Two weeks later the emperor denied he was divine, and the 1947 constitution separated religion from the state.

The first rendezvous: two crewed spacecraft flying in formation, at times 30 cm apart. The next day Schirra and Stafford reported a satellite in polar orbit piloted by a man in a red suit, then played Jingle Bells on a smuggled harmonica and bells.

A lander built to survive 180 atmospheres, on a guess about Venus that its predecessors had kept getting wrong.

The first working landing on another planet. Its parachute failed and it hit the ground hard, but it sent 23 minutes of faint signal from a surface at about 475 °C, found only when the recordings were analysed again weeks later.

The first soft landing on another planet. The parachute failed partway down and the capsule hit hard, probably tipping over, so its signal was faint. Only when the tapes were reprocessed did engineers find 23 minutes of data from the surface: about 475 °C and 90 atmospheres.

Venus and Halley in one trip, with instruments from across Europe. At Venus in June 1985 it dropped a lander and a balloon that drifted for two days in the clouds, tracked by radio telescopes around the world.

Dre replayed Parliament-Funkadelic grooves with live musicians, laid a high whining synthesizer over them, and called it G-funk. The album, Death Row’s first, introduced Snoop Doggy Dogg and went triple platinum.

Unit 3 was switched off for good in a ceremony broadcast live, fourteen years after its neighbour exploded.

Wang Chuanfu founded BYD in Shenzhen in 1995 to make batteries for phones. The F3DM, sold at first to companies and government agencies, ran about 60 kilometres on its battery before the petrol engine took over. Months earlier Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway had bought about a tenth of BYD.

He was buried at his family’s homestead in the village where he had herded cattle as a boy, after a state funeral that mixed military honours with Thembu custom.

After Houthi forces in Yemen attacked merchant ships, the big carriers stopped using the Suez Canal and sent their Asia–Europe ships round Africa. Shenzhen to Rotterdam went from about 31 days to about 41.