31 december

Commodus fought in the arena as a gladiator and renamed Rome Colonia Commodiana. When poison failed, his wrestling partner Narcissus strangled him in his bath.

Undermined for years, the tower fell on the last day of 1506, taking the north portals with it. Its Flamboyant replacement was paid for partly by Lenten indulgences to eat butter, and so is the Tour de Beurre.

“The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies” got a 15-year monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The charter named George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, and 215 knights, aldermen and burgesses; Sir Thomas Smythe was its first governor. 31…

For its first century and a half the Company was a shipping and warehouse business that rented space in other people’s empires. It held its factories by leave of Mughal emperors and local rulers, and it made its money on the London auctions of what the ships brought home.

An American invasion of Canada ended in a snowstorm below Quebec’s walls. General Richard Montgomery was killed, Benedict Arnold wounded, and more than 400 Americans captured. Canada stayed British.

The first Oz book, written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated in colour by W. W. Denslow. Baum's introduction, dated Chicago, April 1900, says it was written “solely to please children of today”, a modernized fairy tale from which “the heartaches and nightmares are left out”. Nothing in it says when…

Dorothy’s first visit crosses the whole of Oz from the Munchkin Country in the east to the Winkie Country in the west, and ends in the south at Glinda’s castle.

Baum's second Oz book, and the first illustrated by John R. Neill, who drew every Oz book after it. In his note, dated Chicago, June 1904, Baum says he wrote it because children kept asking for “the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman”, and a girl called Dorothy had made him promise. It introduces Tip,…

Between March and September a clerk with no university post finished a doctoral thesis and sent Annalen der Physik four papers: on light quanta, Brownian motion, relativity and E = mc². He wrote them at home in Bern’s old town and, when he could, at his desk in the patent office. Each paper…

Dorothy arrives from the sea on the far side of the desert and crosses back into Oz with Ozma, by way of the Nome King’s caverns.

The third Oz book is the first in which Dorothy goes back to Oz, and the first set outside it, in the Land of Ev across the desert. Baum's full title promises “a record of her adventures with Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Tiktok, the Cowardly Lion, and the…

Dorothy reaches Oz this time from California, through a crack in the earth, and the Wizard of Oz comes back with her. Baum's introduction explains why the book is about a girl, a boy and a kitten rather than the Scarecrow: the children who wrote to him asked for the Wizard. The underground…

Dorothy’s third visit starts in California and runs through the earth to the Vegetable Kingdom at the right-hand edge of the map, and up again to the Emerald City.

Dorothy’s fourth visit starts in Kansas and takes the road: down through the Scoodlers’ country and across the desert by sand-boat into the Winkie Country.

Dorothy sets out from the Kansas farm with a tramp and a lost boy and never meets a cyclone: she walks, and the road is what takes her to Oz. The book gathers the Shaggy Man, Button-Bright and Polychrome, and ends with Ozma’s birthday party, which draws guests from fairylands all over the world.

Dorothy’s fifth visit is the last: the whole family moves to Oz, and Oz is closed.

Baum meant this sixth book to be the last. Two plots run side by side through it: Dorothy’s family comes to live in Oz, and the Nome King plans to destroy it. Baum’s author’s note says it is “by L. Frank Baum and his correspondents”, since many of its ideas came from readers’ letters. The last…

After 1910’s “last” book, Baum reopened Oz with a prologue that explains how: the Royal Historian rigs a wireless tower and Dorothy replies. The quest runs from the Munchkin Country through the Emerald City and the Quadling Country to the Winkie Country, and stars a boy, Ojo, and a girl made from…

The eighth book is the one whose first edition carried Neill’s “Map of the countries near to the Land of Oz”, the map under this timeline’s map view. Baum’s foreword says it tells of Ann Soforth, Queen of Oogaboo, “whom Tik-Tok assisted in conquering our old acquaintance, the Nome King”, and of…

Baum dedicates the ninth book to the Uplifters of Los Angeles and explains in “’Twixt You and Me” that children had insisted Trot and Cap’n Bill be admitted to Oz. They arrive by way of a whirlpool, a talking Ork and the kingdom of Jinxland, where no one has ever visited from Oz; it is the…

Baum’s own introduction calls it “a story with a boy hero, and a boy of whom you have never before heard”. It was written years before it appeared, and most of it takes place beyond the desert, on the Nonestic Ocean at the top right of Neill’s map; Oz arrives only in the last third, when Dorothy…

Baum dedicates this book to his granddaughter Ozma Baum, and says its main idea came from a girl of eleven who told him: “I s’pose if Ozma ever got lost, or stolen, ev’rybody in Oz would be dreadful sorry.” It is the first Oz book written as a mystery, and every character from Dorothy to the…

In “To My Readers” Baum says many correspondents had asked “what ever became of the ‘pretty Munchkin girl’” the Tin Woodman had been engaged to marry before the Wicked Witch enchanted his axe. This is the book that answers it, with a boy named Woot, a tin soldier and a man made of the Tin…

Baum died on 6 May 1919, and this thirteenth book appeared that year. His note “To My Readers” says the “events which have taken place in the last few years in our ‘great outside world’” were so marvellous that he could not hope to equal them, yet “The Magic of Oz” is “really more strange and…

The fourteenth and last Oz book that Baum wrote appeared in 1920, after his death in 1919. The full title promises “the Exciting Experiences of Princess Ozma of Oz, and Dorothy, in their hazardous journey to the home of the Flatheads, and to the Magic Isle of the Skeezers”, and how Glinda rescued…

Charles Davenport opened it beside his genetics station at Cold Spring Harbor with money from Mary Harriman, widow of the railway magnate. Its field workers collected family pedigrees, and its superintendent Harry Laughlin wrote a model sterilisation law (1922) that state laws drew on. The…

Eighteen months in which 67 countries pooled observations of the Earth, from Antarctica to the upper atmosphere. It paid for Keeling’s CO₂ measurements at Mauna Loa and the South Pole.

Five stints in the clubs of St Pauli, Hamburg’s red-light district, playing for hours a night to sailors and gangsters while club owners shouted “Mach Schau!”. Lennon later said the band grew up there. They left Liverpool as a scruffy five-piece and came back, with Astrid Kirchherr’s haircuts, the…

Tu-144 flies firstTupolev Tu-144

The Soviet supersonic airliner beat Concorde into the air by two months, with Eduard Elyan at the controls. It was the first airliner to fly faster than sound, in June 1969.

Bulgaria’s change began inside the party, not on the street, and the street followed. The band stops at the year’s end; the Round Table and the end of the party’s leading role came in January 1990.

At noon the U.S. Panama Canal Commission handed control to the Panama Canal Authority, 85 years after the canal opened.

The five years in which the Kyoto targets counted. Canada withdrew in December 2011, effective a year later. The biggest emitters, the United States and China, had no targets, and world emissions kept rising.

WHO’s China office picked up a notice from the Wuhan health commission about pneumonia of unknown cause; many of the early patients had links to the Huanan seafood market. How the virus reached people is still unsettled.

The Doha Amendment extended Kyoto for fewer countries. It needed 144 acceptances to come into force, and did so on 31 December 2020, the last day of the period it governed.