18 december

His edict took the name Da Yuan, “great origin”, from the Book of Changes: the first dynastic name drawn from an idea rather than a place or a fief. Later dynasties, the Ming and the Qing, followed his lead.

Kublai gave his realm a Chinese dynastic name, Da Yuan, “great origin”, taken from the Book of Changes. His new capital, Dadu, known to the Mongols as Khanbaliq, was rising on the site of modern Beijing.

Kublai’s line ruled China, Mongolia, Manchuria and Tibet from Khanbaliq and the summer capital Shangdu. It kept Chinese officials at arm’s length and ranked its subjects by origin, with Mongols first and southern Chinese last.

The first voyage beyond India. Ma Huan, a Muslim interpreter who knew Arabic and Persian, sailed on it; his account of the lands they saw is the best source there is. Squadrons also went to Bengal and the Maldives.

The City and South London Railway ran electric trains in iron-lined tunnels bored deep under the Thames, the first underground line worked by electricity. Its carriages had only slits for windows, and riders called them “padded cells”.

The Constitution Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act was the first anywhere to let women stand for parliament as well as vote, and it included Aboriginal women on the same terms. Women first voted in April 1896.

Kandinsky and Marc organized it after Kandinsky’s large painting was rejected by the Neue Künstlervereinigung München. Beside their own work hung Henri Rousseau and paintings by the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art appeared the same month, and the…

The longest battle of the war, fought in a few square kilometres around the forts of Verdun. France rotated most of its army through it along a single road, the Voie Sacrée. The two sides lost about 700,000 men killed, wounded and missing, some 300,000 of them dead, and the line ended close to…

After the Paris talks stalled, Nixon sent B-52s against Hanoi and Haiphong for eleven days, with a pause on Christmas Day. Fifteen B-52s were shot down. Hanoi counted 1,624 civilians killed; Bạch Mai hospital was among the places hit. The talks resumed in January.

The General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women by 130 votes to none, with 10 abstentions. Its articles cover education, work and pay, health and family planning, property, and marriage and divorce. In force from 1981, it has 189 states…

Every Monday after the five o’clock prayers for peace at the Nikolaikirche, marchers walked the inner ring road. Their numbers grew from a small gathering in early September to hundreds of thousands by November. The marches paused for Christmas and went on until March 1990.

Robert Williams spent his director’s discretionary time pointing Hubble for ten days at a patch of Ursa Major that looked empty, about the size of a tennis ball seen from 100 metres. It held some 3,000 galaxies, some seen as they were more than ten billion years ago.

A telescope that looks down through the Earth: 5,160 light sensors frozen into a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, watching for the blue flash when a neutrino strikes an atom. In 2017 it traced one to a blazar about 3.7 billion light-years away.

Two articles over his dealings with Ukraine: abuse of power (230–197) and obstruction of Congress (229–198). The Senate acquitted on 5 February 2020, 48–52 and 47–53; Mitt Romney was the first senator to vote to convict a president of his own party.

From 1998 the finals took 32 teams and 64 matches over a month. The next step, 48 teams, came in 2026.

Argentina led 2–0 with ten minutes left. Mbappé scored twice in two minutes and again in extra time, the second hat-trick in a final after Hurst’s; Lionel Messi scored twice and lifted the trophy in his fifth World Cup.

The first World Cup in the Arab world, moved to November and December to avoid the summer heat. Morocco became the first African team to reach a semi-final.