October 19

Gaiseric’s Vandals seized the city by surprise, and with it the West’s richest provinces. Losing the grain and taxes of Africa was, Heather argues, the blow the western empire could not survive.

The end came with no peace treaty. England kept only Calais, which it lost in 1558, and its kings went on calling themselves kings of France until 1801. Within two years England was fighting the Wars of the Roses.

Henry V came to conquer, not to raid: he took Normandy town by town and was made heir to France at Troyes. His death at 35 left a baby king, and after Orléans, Arras and the French artillery trains of the 1440s the conquest was undone in four years.

Gascony had been English for three centuries, and its wine trade ran through Bordeaux to England. A French raid routed the Bordeaux militia at Blanquefort in November 1450; the duchy fell in 1451, rose to bring the English back in 1452, and fell for good the next year.

Until now each voyage, and later each joint stock, was raised for a few years and then wound up. Cromwell’s charter gave the Company permanent capital whose shares could be traded, the shape of a modern company. Charles II confirmed it in 1661.

Delegates from nine colonies met in New York and resolved that no taxes could be imposed on a free people “but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives”. “No taxation without representation” is the slogan that later condensed the idea, not a line anyone is recorded…

About 8,000 Continentals and militia and about 8,000 French under Rochambeau and the fleet dug parallels toward Cornwallis’s lines.

Cornwallis said he was ill and sent his deputy, Charles O’Hara, who tried to hand his sword to Rochambeau. Rochambeau pointed him to Washington, who pointed him to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln: the man who had surrendered Charleston.

Stalled in the North, Britain turned south, counting on Loyalists and the fear of slave revolt to hold the colonies it retook. It became a brutal civil war between neighbours.

Amundsen, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting, with four sledges and 52 dogs, on skis. From 80° south they raised snow cairns the height of a man to mark the way home: due south from Framheim, over an unknown range and onto the plateau.

The last German attempt to break through before winter, around the Flemish town the British would hold for the rest of the war. It destroyed most of the old regular British Army; Indian troops, just arrived from Marseille, filled gaps in the line.

As UN troops pushed toward the Chinese border, Mao sent his “Chinese People’s Volunteers” across the Yalu at night, at Andong and other crossings. Their first offensives in November and December drove the UN force out of North Korea in the longest retreat in American military history.

The Joint Chiefs pressed for air strikes and an invasion. Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay told the President a blockade would be seen as weakness: “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”

The first known video game tournament: Stanford researchers played Spacewar! for the grand prize of a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone, whose reporter Stewart Brand had come to write about them. Bruce Baumgart won the five-player free-for-all.

Black students left the multiracial student union to form their own, the South African Students’ Organisation, launched at Turfloop with Steve Biko as its first president. It taught that black people must free their own minds first. Biko: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is…

The government banned nineteen organisations, almost the whole Black Consciousness movement, shut down the newspaper The World and detained its editor, Percy Qoboza. The white editor Donald Woods, Biko’s friend, was banned, and fled the country.

Ugandan doctors described a wasting illness in the fishing and trading villages on Lake Victoria’s western shore, known locally as “slim”. Of 71 patients, 63 carried HTLV-III, the virus behind AIDS; women were affected nearly as often as men.