January 16

Three days after Octavian handed his powers back to the Senate, it named him Augustus, “revered”, and gave most of the powers back. He later boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.

Augustus kept the Republic’s offices and names and held the power himself as princeps, first citizen, never king. The fiction held until Diocletian dropped it.

After a special commission at York Castle, fourteen men were hanged in a single day, a week after three others were hanged for murdering the mill owner William Horsfall. Yorkshire Luddism was broken.

A white band of seashells ran along the cliffs of the volcanic island, well above the sea: the land had risen, slowly, just as Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology said it could. FitzRoy had given him volume one. Here Darwin first thought he might write a book on geology.

After meeting Black ministers in Savannah, Sherman set aside the coast from Charleston to Florida for freed families, in plots of up to forty acres. About 40,000 people settled there before President Johnson gave the land back to its former owners later that year.

A third expedition: Nobu Shirase’s Japanese party in the Kainan Maru landed on the Barrier near Framheim while Amundsen was on his way home. Its “dash patrol” sledged south over the ice shelf to about 80° S and turned back.

Bowers saw it first: “a black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs’ paws—many dogs.” Scott wrote: “The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole.”

The Ross Sea party’s ship, bought from Douglas Mawson, under Aeneas Mackintosh. Its job was to lay food depots as far as the Beardmore Glacier for Shackleton’s crossing party, due to arrive from the Pole.

Germany’s foreign minister offered Mexico an alliance if the United States entered the war, and help to recover “the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona”. British codebreakers in Room 40 read it; it was published in the United States on 1 March 1917, and Zimmermann admitted it was…

Goodman’s orchestra, with Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, was joined by Count Basie, Lester Young and members of Ellington’s band for a jam session: an integrated stage in the country’s grandest concert hall. A recording made off a single microphone was found in a closet and issued on LP in 1950,…

Sixteen days of science: about 80 experiments, worked around the clock in two shifts in a Spacehab module. The crew: Rick Husband, commander William McCool, pilot Michael Anderson, payload commander Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist David Brown, mission specialist Laurel Clark, mission specialist…

81.7 seconds after launch a block of insulating foam from the external tank’s left bipod ramp hit the leading edge of the left wing at about 880 km/h, near reinforced carbon-carbon panel 8. Engineers saw it on film the next day.

A DVD-by-mail company added “Watch Now”: about 1,000 titles to play in a web browser, against 70,000 on disc, with viewing hours rationed by subscription plan. Within a decade it was making its own films and series.

Tomas Mikolov’s team at Google turned each word into a list of numbers learned from its neighbours in billions of words of text. The numbers did arithmetic with meaning: king − man + woman landed nearest to queen.