August 11

Stela 11, for this k’atun ending, names King Jasaw Chan K’awiil II. It is the last dated monument at Tikal. Squatters later camped in the empty palaces of the Central Acropolis. Long Count 10.2.0.0.0 3 Ajaw 3 Keh

The khan was leading the war on the Song himself when he died in camp before the fortress on its cliff above the Jialing, of disease by most accounts. His death halted the campaigns on every front as the princes turned home to fight over the throne.

Tolui’s eldest son took the throne with Batu’s backing and purged the Ögedeid and Chagatayid princes who opposed him. He ordered a census of the empire and sent Hülegü west and Kublai south.

The register reads “Hamnet filius William Shakspere”. His only son was eleven. No record says what he died of, or whether his father was home.

Hunting elk in a willow thicket with Pierre Cruzatte, a fiddler who was blind in one eye and short-sighted in the other, Lewis was hit by a ball that passed through his left thigh and grazed the right. Cruzatte had taken his buckskins for an elk. Lewis finished the journey lying face down in a…

Captain H. J. G. Ferzenaar, chief of the topographical staff of Bantam, sketched the island from a native boat. The forest was dead under half a metre of dust, and besides three large vapour columns he counted eleven smaller vents.

Mina wakes to find Lucy’s bed empty and runs to the East Cliff, where under a bright full moon she sees “something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure” on their seat. It raises a head with “red, gleaming eyes” and is gone when she arrives; Lucy is asleep, breathing in…

At noon Lucy looks better than for weeks, but there are “two little red points like pin-pricks” on her throat, which Mina blames on her safety-pin. They take lunch to Mulgrave Woods, and in the evening hear Spohr and Mackenzie on the Casino Terrace.

Five days after the Voting Rights Act, a drunk-driving arrest in Watts set off six days of rioting. The McCone Commission counted 34 dead, 1,032 injured and 3,952 arrested, and about $40 million in damage. The South’s new laws had done little for Northern and Western ghettos.

British Rail ended steam with the “Fifteen Guinea Special”, named for its fare, from Liverpool to Carlisle and back. Then it banned steam from its tracks for three years.

Cindy Campbell rented the building’s recreation room to raise money for new school clothes, and her brother Clive, DJ Kool Herc, played. Herc noticed the dancers waited for the instrumental break of a funk record, so he played just the breaks, and soon stretched them with two copies of the same…

A decade of parties before records: DJs with home-built sound systems playing rec rooms, parks and community centres, often powered by tapping a streetlight. The DJ was the star; the MCs began as the DJ’s hype men, and crews were known by their sound systems and their flyers as much as their names.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Sedgwick Avenue party, a concert a few miles from it brought together Run-DMC, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Lil Wayne, Nas and Lauryn Hill. A set for the pioneers opened with DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell, the brother and sister who threw the first party.

A hundred years after Paris 1924, the Games came back to the city of Coubertin. For the first time the athletes’ places were split exactly half and half between women and men.