26 juni

Julian had tried to turn the empire back to the old gods. A spear caught him in a skirmish on the retreat from Ctesiphon, and his successor Jovian bought the army’s way home by ceding five provinces and Nisibis to Persia.

Almagro, his old partner, had fought him over Cusco and been executed by his brother Hernando in 1538. Almagro’s followers broke into Pizarro’s palace in Lima and killed him. The conquerors’ civil wars went on for most of a decade.

The Lutheran king of Sweden came ashore on the island of Usedom with about 14,000 men. Sweden kept the Julian calendar, so this is 26 June in the Swedish records and 6 July in the imperial ones.

Cotton Mather had learned of inoculation from Onesimus, a West African man he enslaved, who described how it was done in Africa. When smallpox came to Boston only Zabdiel Boylston would try it, starting with his six-year-old son Thomas and two enslaved people in his household. His figures for the…

Symphonies in E flat, G minor and C major, K. 543, 550 and 551, entered in his catalogue within seven weeks of one summer, in a suburban flat he had moved to to save rent. The same weeks he wrote to his fellow Mason Michael Puchberg for loans. The last was later nicknamed the “Jupiter”.

Fluorine attacks almost everything, and chemists who tried to free it had been poisoned and some killed. Henri Moissan electrolysed potassium fluoride dissolved in liquid hydrogen fluoride, in a platinum apparatus cooled to −50 °C, and got a pale yellow gas that set silicon alight. It won him the…

When the Soviet Union blocked the roads and railways into West Berlin, American and British aircraft fed the city of two million by air, flying in more than 2.3 million tons of food and coal. At the peak an aircraft landed every few minutes.

He finished his BA by correspondence and enrolled to read law at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the only African student in the law faculty. Through Sisulu’s house in Orlando he joined the young men who wanted the ANC, then a body of petitions and deputations, to turn to mass…

Volunteers of the ANC and the South African Indian Congress broke apartheid laws in public, walking through “Europeans only” entrances and staying out after curfew, and went quietly to jail. Mandela was national volunteer-in-chief. More than 8,000 were arrested, and ANC membership grew from about…

The ANC and the South African Indian Congress sent volunteers to break apartheid laws in public, through “Europeans only” doors and after curfew, and to go quietly to jail. More than 8,000 were arrested, most of them in the Eastern Cape, and ANC membership grew from about 7,000 to some 100,000.

About 3,000 delegates at the Congress of the People approved it clause by clause: “The People Shall Govern!” and “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”. Mandela, under a ban, watched from the edge of the crowd until police broke up the meeting on its second afternoon.

The Congress of the People, called by the ANC and its allies in the Congress Alliance, drew about 3,000 delegates to a field outside Johannesburg. They adopted demands gathered from across the country, clause by clause: “The People Shall Govern!” Police ended the meeting on its second afternoon…

Kennedy spoke to a vast crowd outside West Berlin’s city hall: “There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.” He closed on “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

James Meredith set out to walk alone from Memphis to Jackson and was shot and wounded on the second day. King, SNCC and CORE finished the march for him, registering voters along the way, and some 15,000 rallied at the Mississippi capitol at the end.

Bill Clinton, flanked by Francis Collins of the public project and Craig Venter of the rival company Celera, with Tony Blair by satellite from London, announced a rough draft: Today we are learning the language in which God created life.

The Cosco Shipping Panama made the first transit of the expanded canal. The new locks take ships 49 metres wide, carrying about three times as many boxes as the old Panamax limit.

The container ship Cosco Shipping Panama passed through a third set of locks, at Agua Clara and Cocolí, built for ships too big for the 1914 chambers. Panamanians had approved the project in a 2006 referendum.

A Nike project to see whether a woman could run four minutes. Male pacemakers ran in formation around her and her spikes were not approved for competition, so the time could never be a record. The clock read 4:06.91 from the gun; Nike’s camera, timing her from her first movement, made it 4:06.42.…