June 12

George Mason’s list of rights, from free elections to a free press, opened with “all men are by nature equally free and independent”. Jefferson drew on it within weeks, and Madison thirteen years later for the Bill of Rights.

Grant’s last attempt to break Lee’s line north of Richmond. 15,500 casualties (NPS), 13,000 of them Union.

She finished the Russian state gymnasium at fifteen, having “always held first rank” in her class, and was sent to relatives in the country for almost a year’s rest, the last idle year of her life.

He tried to become an English gentleman, with an evening suit and lessons in dancing, French, elocution and the violin, then gave it up. A vegetarian restaurant on Farringdon Street and Henry Salt’s A Plea for Vegetarianism made him a vegetarian by conviction. He first read the Bhagavad Gita here,…

Women could vote and stand for the new federal Parliament, but the Act shut out any “aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand” not already on a state roll. No woman was elected to it until 1943.

Hours after Kennedy spoke, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi was shot in the back in his own driveway in Jackson as he came home. Two all-white juries deadlocked in 1964; Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of the murder only in 1994.

The biggest crowd of the band’s career lined the road from the airport to the Town Hall balcony; estimates run to 300,000, about half the city.

On 11 June Justice Quartus de Wet convicted eight of the accused and acquitted Rusty Bernstein. The next morning he said the crime was in essence high treason but that he would not impose the supreme penalty, and gave life. That night seven of them were flown to Robben Island; Denis Goldberg, who…

The charge was sabotage and conspiracy, and it carried the death penalty. Bram Fischer led the defence against the prosecutor Percy Yutar. The accused agreed not to deny what they had done, only that they had decided on guerrilla war, and to turn the trial on apartheid.

Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. — Chief Justice Earl Warren Richard and Mildred Loving had married in Washington in 1958 and been arrested in their bedroom back in Virginia. The…

Declared across the whole country four days before the tenth anniversary of Soweto, and renewed every year. Tens of thousands were held without trial, many of them children. In February 1988 the UDF and more than a dozen other organisations were barred from all political activity.

It began in the Vaal Triangle on the day the new constitution came into force, over rent increases set by black town councils that residents saw as puppets. Councillors were attacked, schools boycotted, and townships declared “ungovernable”. The army was sent into the townships.

With the Brandenburg Gate behind him, Reagan spoke to the East: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

It began with Sergei Krikalev, the first cosmonaut to fly on an American spacecraft, on STS-60. Nine shuttle dockings followed, and seven American astronauts lived aboard Mir, practice for building a station together.

A year earlier, a million Brazilians had marched against the cost of the stadiums while public services went short. Goal-line technology was used for the first time.

“Attention Is All You Need”: eight researchers, most at Google, replaced the step-by-step networks used for translation with a simpler design that looks at a whole sentence at once and trains in parallel on GPUs. It is the T in GPT.

Eight researchers, most at Google, dropped the step-by-step recurrent networks used for translation in favour of attention alone: every word looks at every other word at once, so training runs in parallel on GPUs. Their transformer is the T in GPT.