November 13

Æthelred ordered all the Danes in England killed. A charter of 1004 says those in Oxford fled into St Frideswide’s church, and the townsmen burned it with them inside. In 2008 a mass grave of young men, many with wounds, was found at St John’s College; it may be the victims of that night.

Henry paid for the ships and took a share of what they brought back. He never sailed further than Morocco, and his school of navigation at Sagres is a legend; English writers only began to call him “the Navigator” in the nineteenth century.

Tycho spotted it at dusk while fishing on Hven. His measurements put it far beyond the Moon and moving straight through the zone where the planets’ crystalline spheres were meant to be. After it, he said, there were no spheres.

The one international synod of the Reformed churches, with delegates from England, Scotland, Switzerland and Germany, condemned the Remonstrants, who taught that grace could be resisted. Its canons defined strict Calvinism. Days before it closed, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the Remonstrants’…

A first cable, laid in 1850, carried messages for one evening before it failed; a fisherman is said to have hauled it up and cut out a piece. The 1851 cable was armoured with iron wire, and it worked. Within months London and Paris were trading stock prices the same day.

Rabindranath Tagore, poet of Santiniketan, became the first non-European Nobel laureate, for the English Gitanjali. He later wrote the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about sixfold in eight years, carried by radio, cars and buying on margin: loans to brokers passed 8 billion dollars in 1929.

In June a three-judge federal court had ruled 2 to 1 that Montgomery’s bus segregation broke the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court affirmed without hearing argument. The plaintiffs were four women: Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith.

Every Gemini spacewalker before him had overheated and worn himself out. Aldrin, who had trained underwater, used foot restraints and handholds on Gemini 12 and worked outside for hours with ease.

Law 9,313 obliged the public health system to give every person with HIV the medicines they needed, free. Brazil made generic versions of off-patent drugs and threatened to break patents to bring others down in price.