August 16

From Cempoala, whose Totonac lord had joined him against the Mexica, up over the mountains, through Tlaxcala and Cholula, and over the pass between Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl into the Basin of Mexico.

A crowd of about 60,000 gathered peacefully in Manchester to hear Henry Hunt call for parliamentary reform. The magistrates sent in the yeomanry with sabres, then the Hussars. Contemporary lists name at least 15 dead and 400 to 700 injured; Robert Poole counts 18 dead and nearly 700 hurt, many of…

The Queen’s message of 98 words took about sixteen hours to send. New York celebrated with parades, and fireworks set the roof of City Hall on fire. Weeks later the cable was dead, and some doubted it had ever worked at all.

Smuts did not repeal the act. In the mosque grounds a crowd threw more than two thousand certificates into a cauldron of paraffin and set them alight.

Awarded to Weimar Germany in 1931 and staged by the Nazi regime as propaganda, after a boycott campaign in the United States failed. The torch relay from Olympia began here, and Leni Riefenstahl filmed it all for Olympia.

The founder died on the Riviera, aged 75, in the first summer since 1918 without a Tour. He had ridden in the car behind the first stage of 1936, then handed the race to Jacques Goddet.

An Allied raid on Milan brought down the refectory’s roof and one wall. The painted wall, braced with sandbags and scaffolding, stood open to the weather for months.

A Muslim League day of protest for Pakistan turned into four days of killing between Muslims and Hindus. About 4,000 people died and many more fled their homes, and the violence spread to Noakhali and Bihar.

Five stints in the clubs of St Pauli, Hamburg’s red-light district, playing for hours a night to sailors and gangsters while club owners shouted “Mach Schau!”. Lennon later said the band grew up there. They left Liverpool as a scruffy five-piece and came back, with Astrid Kirchherr’s haircuts, the…

Lennon’s skiffle group, named after his school, Quarry Bank. Over three years it shed its schoolfriends and its washboard, took in McCartney, Harrison and the art student Stuart Sutcliffe, and tried out names — Johnny and the Moondogs, the Silver Beetles — before settling on the Beatles in the…

Epstein called Best to his office and told him the others wanted him out. It was done after two years in the band and weeks before their first single; fans chanted “Pete forever, Ringo never!” at the Cavern, and Harrison got a black eye.

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.

Bolt won the 100 metres in a world record while slowing down and thumping his chest before the line, with a shoelace undone. He won the 200 in 19.30, another world record, four days later.