15 september

Two days after beating the Vandal king Gelimer at Ad Decimum, Belisarius marched into Carthage and ate the dinner prepared for Gelimer in the palace. Africa, lost in 439, was Roman again.

Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, an old man, took the grand vizierate on condition of a free hand, and executed thousands to restore order. His family held the office for much of the next half-century.

Twenty-five returns seen, feared and recorded, and never recognised as the same comet. Aristotle had taught that comets were fires in the upper air, and for most of these centuries a comet was read as a warning: of a ruler’s death, a war, a conquest.

Edmond Halley saw it from Islington. England still kept the Julian calendar, so his notebook dates run ten days behind these. Only after Newton’s Principia gave him the tools did he compute its orbit and find it matched the comets of 1531 and 1607.

Seventy-six years between the last unexplained visit and the first predicted one. Halley’s claim could only be tested after he was dead, and by late 1758 astronomers across Europe were searching the sky for it.

The first intercity railway, with every train pulled by steam and running to a timetable. The Duke of Wellington, the prime minister, rode in the opening procession, and Manchester crowds jeered him. Within months it carried over a thousand passengers a day.

The first intercity railway, with every train hauled by steam and run to a timetable. It carried passengers as well as goods from the start, and within months more than a thousand people a day were riding it.

At a water stop at Parkside the Liverpool MP stepped down to greet Wellington and was caught by Rocket on the other track. Stephenson rushed him to Eccles on the Northumbrian, but he died there that night: the first widely reported railway death.

At a water stop at Parkside on the opening day, the Liverpool MP stepped down to greet the Duke of Wellington and was caught by Rocket on the other track. He died that evening at Eccles: the first widely reported railway death.

Five weeks, to 20 October, on four of the islands. The vice-governor, Nicholas Lawson, said he could tell which island a tortoise came from by its shell. What struck Darwin most at the time were the mockingbirds, which differed from island to island; he did not even label his finches by island.…

Surrounded on the heights above the town, the garrison gave up to Jackson: 12,419 men captured (NPS), the largest surrender of American troops until Bataan in 1942.

The first tanks in any battle. Of the 49 sent, fewer than half reached the start line and many broke down or bogged in the craters, but one led the infantry into Flers, and the British ordered a thousand more.

Serbian and French troops stormed the mountain ridge and broke the Bulgarian line. Within two weeks Bulgaria asked for an armistice, the first of the Central Powers to leave the war.

With the UN force penned into the Pusan perimeter, Douglas MacArthur landed behind the North Korean lines at Inchon, a port with tides of about ten metres that most of his staff thought impossible. Seoul was retaken within two weeks.

Aeroflot flew the Tupolev Tu-104 from Moscow to Irkutsk by Omsk. With the Comet grounded, it was for two years the only jet airliner in regular service anywhere in the world.

A Klan bomb under the church steps went off at about 10:22 on a Sunday morning and killed four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, all fourteen, and Denise McNair, eleven. The FBI counts more than 20 others injured. Later that day police shot Johnny Robinson, sixteen,…

189 governments adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, with twelve areas for action, from poverty and education to violence and the girl child. On 5 September Hillary Clinton told delegates that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights”.

North and South Korea marched in together under one flag. The Games are often called the best run of the modern era, a title the IOC’s president gave them at the close: “the best Olympic Games ever”.

With about 639 billion dollars in assets, the largest bankruptcy in American history. No buyer and no government rescue came, and within days credit stopped moving worldwide.

Sunday evening. With regulators on the line, Christopher Cox told Lehman’s directors, meeting at 745 Seventh Avenue, that the government expected them to declare bankruptcy that night, before Asian markets opened.

A month in which the system nearly stopped. The premium banks charged each other over the risk-free rate for three-month loans peaked at about 3.6 percentage points in October, against a tenth of a point before the crunch.

About 1:45 a.m. in New York. With about 639 billion dollars in assets it was the largest bankruptcy in American history. Its staff carried their belongings out of 745 Seventh Avenue in boxes that morning, on live television.

For two and a half days the heads of Wall Street’s banks sat in the New York Fed trying to find a buyer for Lehman. Paulson had told them there would be no public money this time.

Down 4.4 per cent to 10,917.51 at the close, then the biggest point drop since the days after 11 September 2001. Shares in AIG lost 61 per cent.

A London sound at about 140 beats a minute, grown out of UK garage on pirate radio and the tower blocks of Bow. Wiley’s “Eskimo” instrumentals set its tone. It faded from the charts in the late 2000s and came back to win the Mercury Prize for Skepta’s “Konnichiwa” in 2016.

A NASA orbiter carrying a European probe, and one of the most productive planetary missions ever flown. Launch drew protests over its plutonium power source. It made 294 orbits of Saturn and sent back more than 450,000 pictures.