3 juni

Firuz, a commander of the towers who had come to terms with Bohemond, let his men climb a ladder to the walls before dawn. The crusaders killed much of the population, but the citadel held out, and a Muslim relief army was days away.

Bohemond kept the city for himself, breaking the oath he had sworn to Alexios to return former imperial lands. His Norman principality lasted 170 years, until Baybars took the city.

Antioch’s walls ran over the mountain above the city and could not be closed off. Through the winter the besiegers starved more than the besieged, eating their horses while Bohemond looked for a traitor inside.

The Privy Council closed the London playhouses on 23 June 1592 after a riot in Southwark, and plague kept them shut for most of two years, with short winter seasons in between. Companies broke up or toured the provinces. Shakespeare turned to narrative poems for a patron.

Henslowe’s first record of the new company: it shared a small playhouse south of the river with the Admiral’s Men. Among the plays were Titus, a “tamynge of A shrowe” and a “hamlet”, an older play on the story, now lost, and not Shakespeare’s.

At an unexpected fork, the men took the muddy north branch for the Missouri, since it looked like the river they knew. The captains chose the clear south fork, because the Hidatsa had said the Missouri had great falls. They spent a week scouting both. Lewis named the north branch Maria’s River for…

From Shivaji’s hill forts to an empire run by the Peshwas, the Brahmin chief ministers in Pune. At its height in the 1750s Maratha armies collected tribute from Tamil Nadu to the Punjab.

Baji Rao II gave himself up to John Malcolm and was pensioned off to Bithoor on the Ganga. The Company was now the paramount power in India. His adopted son, Nana Sahib, would lead the rising at Cawnpore.

The imperial commissioner made the foreign merchants at Canton hand over their stocks, over 20,000 chests of mostly Company-grown opium, and at Humen had it mixed with lime and salt and flushed into the sea. It took three weeks.

Some soldiers pinned their names to their coats before the attack. Thousands fell within the first hour, for no gain. “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made,” Grant wrote in his memoirs.

The last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, announced that British India would be divided in two, and soon after brought the handover forward to 15 August, ten months early. Nehru and Jinnah accepted on the radio.

The first American outside a spacecraft, steering himself on Gemini 4 with a hand-held gas gun until it ran dry. Ordered back in, he said: “It’s the saddest moment of my life.”

Smith broke two records in one race, at 1500 metres and the mile, and both were the first women’s records the IAAF ratified at those distances, thirteen years after Leather’s run.

Pulling out of a steep dive during its display, the second production Tu-144 broke up over Goussainville. Fourteen people died: the six crew and eight on the ground.

Russian, French and American teams drilled 3,623 metres at the coldest station on Earth, stopping above the buried Lake Vostok. The core covered 420,000 years, and carbon dioxide rose and fell with temperature through every cycle.

Forbes counted Shawn Carter as the first hip-hop billionaire: a fortune in cognac, champagne, the streaming service Tidal, art, real estate and his own music catalogue, from a start selling CDs out of his car in Brooklyn.