18 maart

A boycott of British goods hit London’s merchants, and Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. The same day it passed the Declaratory Act, affirming its power to bind the colonies “in all cases whatsoever”.

as the Clatsops will not sell us one at a price which we can afford to give we will take one from them in lue of the six Elk which they stole from us in the winter — Lewis, 17 March Lewis had just paid his own laced uniform coat for a Cathlamet canoe. The next day four men took a Clatsop canoe…

Light, he proposed, behaves as if made of independent quanta of energy, each in proportion to its frequency. That explained why ultraviolet light knocks electrons out of a metal when brighter red light cannot. Planck had quantized only the way matter emits light; Einstein made light itself grainy,…

British and French battleships tried to force the straits by gunfire alone. A line of mines laid ten days earlier by the minelayer Nusret sank three battleships and crippled three more, and the admirals turned to a landing.

A line of mines laid ten days earlier sank three Allied battleships and crippled three more. The navies gave up on forcing the strait alone.

With makeshift clothing and four dogs, the party man-hauled south to lay the depots Shackleton had asked for. By Richards’s count the journeys came to 1,561 miles in 160 days, 830 of them to Mount Hope and back. Scurvy set in on the way home.

Charged with sedition for three articles in Young India, he pleaded guilty and asked for the highest penalty. Judge C. N. Broomfield sentenced him to six years, the same as Bal Gangadhar Tilak had received, and said he would be glad if the government later reduced it.

On a lecture tour of America, Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Everest. The New York Times printed his answer as “Because it’s there”. Nobody else recorded him saying it, and it may be the reporter’s compression of a longer reply.

In the middle of the Second World War, lava overran San Sebastiano al Vesuvio and ash wrecked about 80 American bombers at an airfield near Terzigno. The volcano has been quiet since, and hundreds of thousands of people live on its slopes.

Twelve minutes outside Voskhod 2, the first ever. His suit ballooned in the vacuum and he could not fit back through the airlock until he let air out of his suit. Then the automatic landing failed, and the crew came down far off course in the snowbound forest of the Urals to wait for rescuers.

B-52s began bombing North Vietnamese bases inside neutral Cambodia. The raids ran for fourteen months, hidden by a second set of falsified records; Congress learned of them in 1973.

While Prince Norodom Sihanouk was abroad, Cambodia’s National Assembly voted him out and his prime minister, General Lon Nol, took over. Sihanouk allied himself from Beijing with his old enemies, the Khmer Rouge, and Cambodia’s own civil war began.

Arab oil ministers meeting in Kuwait cut output and then embargoed the United States and others for backing Israel in the October War. Oil prices roughly quadrupled. Drivers queued for petrol, governments cut speed limits, and small, thrifty Japanese cars began to sell in America.

Marseille’s IAM, who took their imagery from ancient Egypt and their subjects from the port city’s estates, made a French rap album that sold over a million copies, one of the best-selling ever made in France.