March 30

The Great Council chose three nobles to take charge of the crisis: they ordered the dead buried on islands in the lagoon and kept watch on ships and travellers. It was one of the first standing public-health boards in Europe.

On census night, for the first time, more people in England and Wales lived in towns than in the countryside. Manchester had grown from about 25,000 people in the 1770s to over 300,000.

Britain and France fought beside the Ottomans to keep Russia out of the Straits. The empire took its first foreign loan in 1854, and the peace of Paris admitted it to the Concert of Europe.

London to Karachi in seven days, by airliner to Basle, train to Genoa, flying boat across the Mediterranean and airliner again from Alexandria by way of Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. By sea the same trip took weeks.

A 23-year-old PAC organiser led a march from Langa and Nyanga to the police headquarters at Caledon Square. On a promise of a meeting with the minister of justice he persuaded the crowd to go home; when he came back for it, he was arrested. The government declared a state of emergency that day.

The House passed the bill 290 to 130 in February. In the Senate, Southern Democrats talked for sixty working days, Robert Byrd for more than 14 hours at the end, until on 10 June the Senate voted 71 to 29 for cloture: the first time it had ever cut off debate on a civil rights bill.

Hanoi sent its army south in a conventional invasion, with tanks, on three fronts: Quảng Trị, An Lộc and Kontum. Quảng Trị city fell on 1 May and was retaken in mid-September after months of fighting that left the Citadel in ruins. South Vietnam held, with American air power.

John Hinckley Jr. wounded him and three others. The bullet stopped about an inch from his heart; he was back at work within weeks, and the 25th Amendment was not invoked.

Rain had flooded Rogers Dry Lake, so Jack Lousma and Gordon Fullerton landed on a gypsum strip in New Mexico, a day late after a sandstorm. The fine white dust got into everything, and no shuttle landed there again.