6 januari

Edward was buried in his new abbey that morning, and Harold, earl of Wessex and the late king’s brother-in-law, was consecrated king the same day, probably in the same church. John of Worcester says Ealdred, archbishop of York, crowned him. William of Poitiers and the Tapestry put Stigand of…

“Forty weeks and one day”, the Chronicle reckons. Harold spent most of it waiting for an invasion, and the end of it fighting two.

The last emperor was invested in the Morea’s hilltop capital, not in Constantinople, and was never crowned in Hagia Sophia. Mystras itself held out until 1460.

Francisco de Montejo the Younger founded the capital of Spanish Yucatán on the Maya city of T’hó. Its cathedral, begun in 1561, was built with stone from T’hó’s pyramids.

she observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either — Lewis She went. By the time Clark’s party reached the stranded whale on 8 January, the Tillamook…

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail sent their first message over two miles of wire looped around the Vail family’s ironworks, and showed it to the public five days later. Morse was a portrait painter; he had turned to electricity after a letter telling him his wife was dying reached him too late.

Elected abbot in 1868, he spent his last years fighting a state tax on monasteries and did little science. He died of kidney disease at 61. Many of his papers were burned after his death.

A civil ceremony at the Bern registry office, with Solovine and Habicht as the only guests. No family came. That night the couple got home to find Einstein had forgotten the key and had to wake the landlady.

The meteorologist Alfred Wegener told the Geological Association in Frankfurt that the continents move: fossils, rocks and coastlines match across the Atlantic. Geologists rejected it for half a century, largely because he had no force strong enough to move them.

A decree of the Soviet Central Executive Committee dissolved it. When delegates came back that afternoon they found the doors locked.

Toward 04:00 local time the anarchist sailor Anatoli Zheleznyakov, head of the guard, told Chernov to close the meeting because the guard was tired. The delegates filed out at 04:40.

The Voice of America’s jazz programme, introduced in Conover’s slow, clear English, reached millions of listeners behind the Iron Curtain. Few Americans had heard of him: the Voice of America was not allowed to broadcast at home.

Begun under Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo and taken over by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, it is a northern Gothic cathedral in Candoglia marble, 579 years in the making. Its last bronze door was inaugurated on 6 January 1965, and the Veneranda Fabbrica that started it still maintains it.

North Vietnamese forces took a whole province north of Saigon. It was Hanoi’s test of what Washington would do, and Washington did nothing. The Politburo planned for victory in 1976; it came in 1975.

Leaders met in Jakarta, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched a flash appeal for $977 million. Governments and the public gave far more: the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition counted $13.5 billion pledged or given internationally, more than $5.5 billion of it from the public: “the most rapidly…

When his last surviving son, Makgatho, died at fifty-four, Mandela called a press conference at his home to say what had killed him, at a time when families hid it, and to urge people to speak of the disease openly.