18 november

He conducted his Little Masonic Cantata, K. 623, at the opening of a new temple for the lodge Zur neugekrönten Hoffnung. It was his last public appearance; two days later he took to his bed.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s army beat the last French force outside Cap-Français. Rochambeau surrendered the next day and evacuated the colony. Yellow fever had already destroyed most of Bonaparte’s expedition.

On “the day of two noons”, American and Canadian railroads replaced dozens of local railway times with four time zones for the continent. Clocks in the East were set back at noon. Congress did not make standard time law until 1918.

Bunau-Varilla, a Frenchman acting as Panama’s minister, signed at John Hay’s house hours before Panama’s own delegates reached Washington. It gave the United States a zone ten miles wide “in perpetuity”, to rule “as if it were the sovereign”, for $10 million and $250,000 a year.

About 300 women marched on Parliament when the government shelved the Conciliation Bill. For six hours police beat and sexually assaulted them; 115 women and four men were arrested.

The new equations made Mercury’s orbit swing round by 43 arcseconds a century more than Newton allowed, the exact anomaly astronomers had puzzled over since Le Verrier. The same paper doubled the bending of starlight to 1.7 arcseconds. “For a few days I was beside myself with joyous excitement,”…

A British and French offensive meant to relieve Verdun. In four and a half months the Allies advanced about ten kilometres, and more than a million men on both sides were killed, wounded or captured.

A decree of the People’s Commissariats of Health and Justice made Soviet Russia the first country to allow abortion at a woman’s request, done free by doctors in hospitals. The decree still called abortion an evil; it gave its reason as ending deaths from illegal operations.

Two months after a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four Black girls, Coltrane recorded a slow lament whose phrasing is said to follow the cadence of Martin Luther King’s eulogy for them.

The first big battle between the U.S. Army and North Vietnamese regulars, in the Central Highlands. The 1st Cavalry Division flew into Landing Zone X-Ray by helicopter and held it; at nearby LZ Albany a battalion on the march was ambushed. About 240 Americans died in four days. Both sides decided…

Tens of thousands gathered by the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a rally the new leadership allowed. It was the largest free gathering in Bulgaria since the Communists took power.

In the early hours the negotiators adopted a constitution with a bill of rights, nine provinces, a Government of National Unity for five years, and one voters’ roll for all. Parliament passed it in December; the homelands would be reincorporated.

Talks began at Groote Schuur in May 1990 and ended with an interim constitution in November 1993. Around them raged a war between ANC and Inkatha supporters in Natal and on the Reef, fed in part by elements of the security forces. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission put the dead of 1990 to…

From the first meeting of the ANC and the government at Groote Schuur to an interim constitution took three and a half years, two breakdowns and a referendum. The breakthrough was the “sunset clauses” proposed by the Communist Party’s Joe Slovo: five years of power-sharing and guarantees for white…

Eighth console generationWii U

Nintendo’s Wii U flopped and Sony’s PlayStation 4 won the fight with the Xbox One. The Nintendo Switch, counted in this generation, was still on sale after its successor arrived in 2025, so the band has no end.