11 november

Walking back to his uncle’s abbey one evening, Tycho saw a star brighter than Venus in Cassiopeia where none had been. It showed no parallax, so it lay beyond the Moon, in heavens that were supposed never to change. It was a supernova.

Separatist Puritans who had left the Church of England, first for Leiden and then for America, signed a covenant to govern themselves aboard the Mayflower off Cape Cod: 41 men signed. They dated it by the English calendar; in Holland it was already 21 November.

A week later he patched the theory with a bold guess about matter: that the trace of its energy tensor vanishes, as it would if all matter were electromagnetic. It let him write the equations in fully general form, for now.

Aeroplanes went to war as unarmed scouts and came out of it as fighters, bombers and ground-attack machines, built by the tens of thousands. The engines, the factories and the pilots left over made the airlines of the 1920s.

She equipped twenty radiological cars, soon called “petites Curies”, and about two hundred fixed X-ray posts behind the French and Belgian lines. She learned to drive one herself, trained 150 women operators at the Radium Institute from 1916, and sent hospitals glass bulbs of radium emanation to…

Marie Curie and her daughter Irène, aged 17, drove X-ray cars to the front; she equipped twenty radiological cars and about two hundred fixed posts. Lise Meitner served as an X-ray nurse in the Austrian army. Chadwick, caught studying in Berlin, spent the war interned at Ruhleben racecourse; Hahn…

Signed in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, soon after five in the morning, by Foch, the British admiral Wemyss and the German delegation under Matthias Erzberger. The fighting was to stop six hours later, so the news could reach the front.

An American sergeant from Baltimore, he charged a German machine-gun post whose crew knew the war was about to end and tried to wave him back. He is usually named the last soldier killed in the war, at one minute to eleven.

It opened east of Amiens with British, Australian, Canadian and French troops and hundreds of tanks; Ludendorff called 8 August “the black day of the German Army”. From then on the Allies attacked all along the line and the German army fell back until it asked for terms.

The largest American battle of the war, with more than a million men committed. The cemetery at Romagne holds 14,246 American graves, the most of any American military cemetery in Europe.

After the war of movement ended in the autumn of 1914, some 700 kilometres of trenches ran from the North Sea to Switzerland and barely moved for three and a half years. Beside the French, British and Belgians fought Indians, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, West Africans,…

At eleven o’clock the Armistice took effect on the Western Front. The line ran close to where it had been in 1914 in places; the British were back at Mons, where they had first fought in August 1914. About 10 million soldiers had died in the war, by Antoine Prost’s count.

Britain’s blockade slowly starved Germany of food and raw materials; Germany answered with U-boats that sank merchant ships without warning. The two battle fleets met in full only once, at Jutland.

The musicians’ union, led by James Petrillo, struck against the record companies, whose records were replacing live players on radio and jukeboxes. Decca settled in 1943, Victor and Columbia in November 1944. So the birth of bebop went unrecorded: Earl Hines’s 1943 band, with Parker and Gillespie,…

With no inspectors allowed ashore, American ships and planes came alongside the eight departing freighters, whose crews pulled back the tarpaulins so the missiles on deck could be counted: 42, as the Soviets had said.

Portugal left Angola to three rival movements. South Africa and the CIA backed two of them; Fidel Castro sent Cuban combat troops to save the third, the MPLA, which declared independence in Luanda. The civil war outlasted the Cold War by a decade.

He paid $30.8 million at Christie’s New York to the estate of Armand Hammer, who had renamed it the Codex Hammer. Gates restored the old name and has lent it to museums around the world.