June 24

Edward’s fleet caught the French fleet packed into the Zwin estuary, its ships lashed together in lines, and fought it ship by ship. Nearly the whole French fleet of some 200 ships was taken or sunk, and one of its admirals, Nicolas Béhuchet, was hanged from his own mast. England held the Channel…

Eighteen or so men in the Matthew, out of Bristol and looking for Asia. The date is traditional and the landfall unknown: Newfoundland, Cape Breton or Labrador. Henry VII's privy purse paid £10 “to hym that founde the new Isle”. Cabot sailed again in 1498 and was not heard of again.

The widowed queen of Garha-Katanga, a Gond kingdom, led her army against Akbar’s general Asaf Khan. Wounded and losing, she killed herself rather than be captured.

The Spanish column found the capital abandoned and burning. Túpac Amaru had fled into the forest; he was hunted down and brought back to Cusco in chains. The ruins at Espíritu Pampa were identified as Vilcabamba only in the 1960s.

Matthew Murray built it for John Blenkinsop’s rack railway, which brought coal into Leeds: a toothed wheel gripped a toothed rail. It was the first steam locomotive to work at a profit, and later blew up when its driver tied down the safety valve.

Grant crossed the Rapidan and never turned back. Seven weeks of almost daily fighting, each battle ending with a march around Lee’s right flank, brought the armies to Petersburg at a cost of more than 50,000 Union casualties.

Five days after a tunnel blast near Cisco killed six men, Chinese crews along thirty miles of line put down their tools. They asked for $40 a month and a ten-hour day, the same terms as white workers. Charles Crocker cut off their food supplies, and within about a week they were back at work.

Watching from the window, Harker sees the Count climb out wearing his own travelling suit, which makes any crime be put down to him in the villages. Later a woman in the courtyard cries “Monster, give me my child!”, the Count calls from the tower, and the wolves of the valley pour in. Harker,…

Of more than a thousand delegates, 105 were Bolsheviks. When Tsereteli said no party was ready to take power alone, Lenin called from the floor: “There is such a party!” The hall laughed.

Right-wing nationalists shot the Jewish foreign minister, a friend of Einstein’s, in his open car on the way to his office. Police warned Einstein that he was on the same list. He cancelled his lectures, kept away from Berlin, and was glad of an invitation to Japan.

After the Western powers brought a new currency into their zones, the Soviets cut every road, rail and canal link to West Berlin. The Americans and British flew the city’s food and coal in instead: more than 2.3 million tons in some 278,000 flights. Stalin lifted the blockade after eleven months;…

Brazil built the Maracanã, then the largest stadium in the world, for it. There was no final: four teams played a closing group, and the fixture list happened to leave Brazil and Uruguay for last. England, at their first World Cup, went out in the first round.

The Springboks were a symbol of white South Africa. At the Rugby World Cup final he came out in the captain’s green jersey, number six, and the mostly white crowd chanted his name. South Africa beat New Zealand 15–12 in extra time.

The ban on women driving ended at midnight, as a royal decree of 26 September 2017 had ordered. Weeks earlier, several women who had campaigned against it, Loujain al-Hathloul among them, were arrested. In 2019 women over 21 were allowed a passport and travel without a male guardian’s consent.

The Court upheld Mississippi’s 15-week limit 6 to 3 and overruled Roe and Casey 5 to 4, returning abortion law to the states. The case came from Jackson, Mississippi, where this timeline’s first law was signed. Within months about a dozen states had near-total bans in force.

The Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that the Constitution protected a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy, striking down most state bans. Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) kept the core of the ruling but let states regulate abortion before viability so long as they placed no “undue burden” on it.