February 24

In the walled park of Mirabello, Spanish arquebusiers cut down the French cavalry and Francis I was taken prisoner. It was the twenty-fifth birthday of his enemy, the emperor Charles V.

Inter gravissimas dropped ten days to put the equinox back on 21 March, and skipped three leap days every four centuries. It is dated 1581: the papal chancery still began its year on 25 March, so its February fell in what we call 1582.

Staged at Carnival for the Accademia degli Invaghiti, a learned society of the Gonzaga court, in a room of the ducal palace nobody has identified for sure. Monteverdi’s score, printed in Venice in 1609, lists the instruments he wanted, which almost no score of the time did. The libretto is by…

Delegates of the bulb traders of several towns proposed that buyers could walk away from contracts made after 30 November 1636 by paying 10 per cent of the price. No one adopted it; the courts treated the contracts as gambling debts, and in 1638 Haarlem let buyers off for 3.5 per cent.

Handel’s first opera for London, and the first Italian opera written for the London stage. The production let live sparrows loose during an aria, which Joseph Addison mocked in The Spectator. English papers dated the night 24 February 1710, their year then beginning on 25 March.

A Tai prince, Sukaphaa, crossed the Patkai hills into the Brahmaputra valley and founded a kingdom that lasted six centuries. Its court kept buranjis, prose chronicles in Ahom and Assamese. It fell to Burmese invasions and, by the treaty of Yandabo, to the British.

The House impeached him 126–47 three days after he tried to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act. With Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding, the Senate acquitted on three of eleven articles and adjourned without voting on the rest.

Two volumes applying the theory to people, and setting out sexual selection to explain peacocks’ tails and human differences. He guessed that humanity’s early ancestors had lived in Africa, decades before the fossils came to light. Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his…

Ship routine ended: the Endurance was now a station on a floe. The dogs went out onto the ice in a ring of snow kennels, the “dogloos”, and the men moved into the hold, fitted out as living quarters and nicknamed “the Ritz”.

The city where the tsar had abdicated a year before fell within a week of the new offensive, 250 kilometres from Petrograd.

Getúlio Vargas’s decree brought in the secret ballot and the vote for women, after years of lobbying by Bertha Lutz. Illiterate Brazilians, most of them poor and many of them women, could not vote until 1985.

In 1974 Paul Berg and colleagues had asked labs to pause the riskiest gene-splicing experiments. At Asilomar about 140 biologists, lawyers and journalists agreed on rules instead: containment to match the risk, and crippled bacteria that could not live outside the lab. The NIH guidelines of 1976…

A village of about 2,500 people held the Winter Games for the second time. Eric Heiden won all five men’s speed skating events, from 500 to 10,000 metres.

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was the first hip-hop album to win the Grammy’s top prize. Hill won five awards that night, then a record for a woman.

Won with gifts and payments to IOC members, which came out in 1998: ten members were expelled or resigned, and the IOC banned its members from visiting bid cities. The Games went ahead five months after 9/11 under heavy security.