December 4

Twenty-five sessions in three stretches, 1545–1547, 1551–1552 and 1562–1563, with long breaks for war and papal politics. It answered the Protestants on doctrine and reformed the clergy, ordering a seminary in every diocese. Its decrees shaped Catholicism until the Second Vatican Council.

Governor-General William Bentinck’s regulation made the burning of widows on their husbands’ pyres a crime in Bengal. The reformer Rammohan Roy had campaigned for it for over a decade.

The new empire replaced the silver thalers and gulden of its states with a gold mark, bought partly with France’s war indemnity of five billion francs. The silver it dumped pushed other countries to follow.

The Bauhaus building in Dessau opensBauhaus Dessau

Forced out of Weimar by a right-wing state government, the school moved to industrial Dessau. Gropius’s new building, its workshop wing wrapped in a glass curtain wall, became the image of modern architecture. It is a World Heritage Site.

To Max Born, on the new quantum mechanics: “An inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” He never changed his mind.

A gangster-owned Harlem nightclub with Black performers and a whites-only audience hired Duke Ellington’s band. Nightly radio broadcasts carried it across the country, and Ellington, writing for the growls of Bubber Miley’s trumpet and Tricky Sam Nanton’s trombone, made his orchestra an instrument…

Made in gaps between tours, and it shows on the sleeve: four tired faces in an autumn park. Six of the fourteen songs are covers. Lennon’s “I’m a Loser” is the first sign of him listening to Bob Dylan.

It passed about 130,000 km above the cloud tops and flew through radiation belts far fiercer than expected, which nearly fried its electronics. The lesson shaped every Jupiter probe after it.

Word spread that the Stasi was burning its files. Citizens occupied its offices in Erfurt that morning and the “Runde Ecke” in Leipzig that evening, the day after Krenz and the whole Politburo resigned.

A short email: during the review “a number of problems emerged, most of which have been resolved, but one in particular I have not yet settled.” He promised to explain it in his Princeton lectures in the spring.

A cheap lander with a microwave-oven-sized rover, Sojourner. Its pictures drew record traffic to NASA’s young website, and its airbag landing was reused for Spirit and Opportunity.

Building the International Space StationUnity

STS-88 joined the American node Unity to the Russian Zarya. From then on most shuttle flights went to the station: 37 of them, carrying the trusses, solar arrays, laboratories and airlock that no other vehicle could lift.