February 11

Leopold arrived in Vienna that day and went straight to his son’s subscription concert. The copyists were still at work on the new concerto, K. 466, and Wolfgang had not had time to play the finale through. It is his first concerto in a minor key.

Asked for terms, Ulysses S. Grant answered: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” The fort on the Cumberland River fell with most of its garrison, and “Unconditional Surrender” Grant was famous. Of 17,398 casualties (NPS), 15,067 were Confederate, most of them…

Drafted by Itō Hirobumi on Prussian lines and given by the emperor to his people, it created an elected Diet but declared that “the Emperor is sacred and inviolable”. The education minister Mori Arinori was stabbed that morning by a nationalist and died the next day.

Their letter, sent on 16 January, gave fission its physics. Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, announced in November 1945; Meitner, nominated again and again, never won. A 1997 study of the committee’s papers called it a postwar injustice.

Eight weeks from a chemical result nobody could explain to its explanation in print. On the night of 17 December Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were sure their irradiated uranium contained barium, an element barely half its weight.

The Big Three met in the Crimea to settle Europe after the war: Germany split into zones, Poland’s borders moved west, and a conference to found the United Nations. Stalin agreed to attack Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender.

Ten songs in about 13 hours in Studio Two, to add to the four sides of the two singles. They left “Twist and Shout” for last because it would wreck Lennon’s voice, already raw from a cold. He managed two takes; the first closes the album.

Under the Group Areas Act the government zoned the mixed inner-city district of Cape Town for whites. Over the next fifteen years about 60,000 people were moved to the Cape Flats and their houses bulldozed; the churches and mosques were left standing.

Japan became the fourth country to launch its own satellite, on the fifth attempt, with an unguided solid-fuel Lambda 4S rocket.

STS-41-B came home to the 4.6-kilometre runway built beside the launch pads, saving the week-long ferry flight from California on top of a 747.

At a televised hearing Feynman squeezed a piece of O-ring rubber in a clamp, dropped it in his glass of ice water, and showed that cold rubber stayed squashed rather than springing back. His own appendix to the report put NASA’s odds of losing a shuttle nearer 1 in 100 than its managers’ 1 in…

Hungary’s reform Communists dismantled their own system from inside, then bargained with the opposition over the rest. Two weeks before the band begins, Politburo member Imre Pozsgay had called 1956 a “popular uprising” on the radio, not the counter-revolution of the official line.

After a stormy two-day meeting the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party endorsed a multi-party system, the first ruling party in the bloc to give up its monopoly on paper.

After twenty-seven years in prison he walked through the gate with his fist raised, and that evening spoke from the balcony of Cape Town City Hall. He said the armed struggle would go on until the causes of it were gone. His life is in its own timeline.

The crowd on the Grand Parade had waited all day. After dark he read: “I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your…

After treatment for tuberculosis he was moved to a warder’s cottage inside a prison farm near Paarl, with a swimming pool and a warder, Jack Swart, to cook for him. There he held secret talks with a committee of officials led by the intelligence chief Niël Barnard, and finished his law degree by…

Hand in hand with Winnie he walked to the prison gate and raised his fist to the crowd and the cameras, an hour later than planned. It was twenty-seven years since his arrest near Howick. Television carried it live around the world.

After 18 days of protest, Hosni Mubarak gave up 30 years of rule. Wael Ghonim, released from eleven days in detention, told CNN: “If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.”