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A missing indenture in Northampton County

About the beginning of November 1654, John Casor approached Captain Samuel Goldsmith at Anthony Johnson's house in Northampton County and said he had come to Virginia under an indenture for seven or eight years, that he had demanded his freedom, and that Johnson had kept him seven years beyond the term.

That is the encounter the surviving record preserves. The 1653 attached to this entry belongs to a different stage — an earlier freedom claim that John Henderson Russell dated to that year.

Goldsmith asked Johnson to produce the indenture. Johnson said he had never seen one and claimed to hold Casor for life. Goldsmith's deposition adds that Robert and George Parker said they knew an indenture existed across the bay.

Reading the date back from March 1655

The encounter survives only inside a later document: the Northampton County order of 8 March 1655, which places it "about the beginning of November last." Read against that court date, the November in question is most naturally November 1654.

Some secondary accounts attach 1653 to Casor's earlier freedom claim and 1654 to the Johnson–Parker litigation; the listed entry appears to fold the two together.

Old Style dating and the gaps in the surviving records make the sequence into 1654/55 difficult to reconstruct precisely.

The appeal and its aftermath

Goldsmith reported that Johnson feared Casor might recover cattle as compensation for the years of excess service. Johnson's wife, sons and son-in-law then pressed him to let Casor go.

Casor entered the service of Robert Parker, a neighboring English planter who treated him as free to enter a new arrangement. Johnson later complained in the Northampton County court that Parker was detaining his servant under the pretense that Casor was free.

Nothing in the surviving evidence proves that Casor entered Parker's service on the same day he appealed to Goldsmith.

Cambridge, 6 February 1671/72

Isaac Newton sent Henry Oldenburg a letter dated 6 February 1671/72 Old Style — 16 February 1672 by the Gregorian calendar — to be communicated to the Royal Society. England was then ten days behind Gregorian reckoning, and its legal year began on 25 March, which is why contemporaries could file the day under February 1671.

The Society had recently examined Newton's reflecting telescope and elected him a fellow. Oldenburg encouraged further communication, and Newton fulfilled his promise to describe the optical discovery behind the telescope.

Thirteen propositions

The letter described admitting sunlight through a small hole in a darkened room, refracting it with a triangular glass prism, and his surprise that the coloured image was oblong rather than circular. What began as a pleasing divertisement became a problem.

Across thirteen numbered propositions he argued that ordinary light is a heterogeneous mixture of rays with different refrangibilities, and that colour is an intrinsic property of those rays rather than something the refracting medium creates.

Red, yellow, green, blue, violet — and indefinitely more

Newton named red, yellow, green, blue and violet-purple as original or primary colours, together with orange, indigo and indefinitely many intermediate gradations. This is not a scheme of seven sharply bounded bands; the later seven-part arrangement was formalized in Opticks.

Oldenburg thanked him on 8 February Old Style and placed an edited version in Philosophical Transactions no. 80, pages 3075–3087, dated 19 February 1671/72. Hooke's objections followed within a week of the paper's circulation.

29 October 1675: a dated page in Paris

In Paris, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz dated a manuscript — Analyseos tetragonisticae pars secunda, "Second Part of Analytical Quadrature" — 29 October 1675. It was not published at the time; the memorandum remained private.

On it he proposed replacing his existing abbreviation "omn." with ∫, writing in effect that ∫l meant the sum of all the l's. The new sign was an elongated S, taken from the Latin summa.

Not a character, an operator

Leibniz had been writing "omn." for omnia — "all" — in summation expressions, and his increasingly elaborate calculations made a shorter operational sign desirable.

He did not stop at the abbreviation. In the same memorandum he explored the inverse relationship between summation and taking differences, and worked through an identity recognizable as an early form of integration by parts.

From working page to print

In his manuscript of 11 November, Leibniz advanced the notation by placing dx after an integral sign, producing an ancestor of the modern ∫…dx form.

None of it was announced. The page sits in the critical edition at Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series VII, volume 5, pages 288–295, and the integral sign did not reach print until June 1686.

29 October 1675: Analyseos tetragonisticae pars secunda

On 29 October 1675 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz used the integral sign ∫ for the first known time, in an unpublished manuscript titled Analyseos tetragonisticae pars secunda. He proposed that ∫ stand in place of omn. — omnia, "all" — and wrote ∫l = omn. l, the sum of all the l's.

The page belongs to a sequence of October–November 1675 quadrature notes in which Leibniz was trying to express systematically the inverse relationship between summing infinitesimal pieces and taking differences. This is the earliest of those notes to carry the notation that survived.

Two weeks later he took the next step. In a second private manuscript dated 11 November, Methodi tangentium inversae exempla — "Examples of the Inverse Method of Tangents" — he first placed dx after the integral sign, replacing his earlier x/d-style notation; MacTutor gives 21 November for the first manuscript use of the combined ∫f(x)dx. The November memorandum sits in the critical edition of Leibniz's Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe at series VII, volume 5, pages 321–331.

The notation ran ahead of the rules behind it

The November manuscript worked an inverse-tangent problem: rather than finding a tangent from a curve, Leibniz tried to recover a curve from a prescribed tangent property, one whose subnormal was inversely proportional to its ordinate. He treated summation as the inverse of taking differences.

The method was unfinished. A Mathematical Association of America reading notes that he was still testing incorrect possibilities for the differentials of products and quotients, and that dx apparently functioned as a constant equal to one in part of the argument.

He reached a correct product rule later in the same notebook sequence, on 27 November 1675.

What 'earliest' rests on

The word earliest depends on what qualifies as infinitesimal calculus. Newton had formulated essential ideas of his fluxional calculus before Leibniz's 1675 manuscripts, though publication and priority became contentious.

Popular accounts describe the event as the first use of integral calculus to find the area under y=f(x). Specialist histories call that a modernised description: the October manuscript concerned quadrature and summation notation, the November one inverse tangents, and Leibniz did not yet possess a clear modern concept of functions, limits or area as an integral.

The work stayed private and caused no immediate public change. His first paper on differential calculus appeared in 1684, and ∫ appeared in print in 1686.

Assent at Westminster

On 16 December 1689 royal assent was given at Westminster to An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown, now known as the Bill of Rights.

The assent gave statutory force to the Declaration of Rights that had been read to William and Mary on 13 February, when the Convention offered them the Crown. They had therefore already been monarchs for ten months; the Act confirmed their authority and the succession settlement rather than putting them on the throne that day.

Thirteen articles

The House of Commons Library summarizes thirteen articles defining limits on the Crown and confirming parliamentary and individual rights: parliamentary consent for taxation and for a peacetime standing army, free elections, freedom of speech in Parliament, the right to petition, and prohibitions on excessive bail, excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishments.

The Act also confirmed the succession settled on William and Mary and their designated Protestant heirs, while excluding persons professing Roman Catholicism from the Crown.

Read the small print

This was mainly a settlement of Crown–Parliament relations and of grievances against James II, not a modern universal declaration of equal individual rights. Its freedom-of-speech provision protects speech and proceedings in Parliament, not public expression generally.

Parliament expressly says the February Declaration was not imposed as a condition William and Mary had to accept before becoming king and queen. And though the Act said its provisions would remain law forever, portions have since been amended or repealed.

22 July 1706: signatures on a draft in London

Commissioners nominated for England and Scotland signed an agreed draft of Articles of Union in London on 22 July 1706, closing negotiations that had run since 16 April.

Thirty-one commissioners had been nominated for each kingdom. They sat in separate rooms and negotiated by passing written papers between them.

What the twenty-five articles proposed

The draft provided for an incorporating union called Great Britain, with a shared Parliament, the Hanoverian Protestant succession, and reciprocal access to trade and colonial markets.

Agreement was not universal on the Scottish side. George Lockhart of Carnwath is the one Scottish commissioner the National Records educational resource identifies as opposing union.

Signed, and binding nothing

The commissioners had no authority to bind either kingdom. A House of Lords constitutional report stresses that they were expressly forbidden to conclude a treaty themselves, and signed only an agreed provisional draft.

The papers were presented to Queen Anne on 23 July, and she recommended them to the Scottish and English parliaments for approval.

4 November 1706: Article I carries in Edinburgh

At Edinburgh on 4 November 1706, the Parliament of Scotland approved the first Article of Union, which set out the principle that Scotland and England would become one kingdom named Great Britain.

The division carried by 116 votes to 83, a majority of 33. The official record lists members by name as approvers and opponents, preserving the political roll call of the day.

Approval with a condition attached

The approval was explicitly conditional: if Parliament did not adjust the remaining articles, its approval of Article I would have no effect.

The same motion promised what Parliament would take up next — not trade or taxation, but legislation securing the doctrine, discipline, worship and government of the established Church of Scotland.

A kingdom scheduled, not created

Article I named 1 May as the future date on which the two kingdoms would be united. Nothing merged on 4 November.

Parliament proceeded to secure the Church of Scotland, then went on debating and amending the other articles for more than two months. The 116–83 tally belongs to Article I and is not the final ratification vote.

16 January 1707: the act passes at Parliament House

At Parliament House in Edinburgh on 16 January 1707, the Scottish Parliament approved the act ratifying the amended Articles of Union with England.

The recorded division was 110 approvers to 67 opponents, with 46 members absent or abstaining. Some secondary accounts report 68 or 69 noes; the official recorded list and Scottish archival summaries give 67.

Assent by sceptre

After the vote, the Duke of Queensberry touched the act with the royal sceptre — the Scottish form by which Queen Anne's assent was signified.

Statutory protection for Scotland's Presbyterian church government was written into the ratification settlement the same day.

Still not one kingdom

The twenty-fifth and final article had been approved on 14 January, and a draft ratification act was introduced on 15 January. What passed on the 16th was the whole amended settlement, church-security provisions included.

It did not create Great Britain that day. Union was expressly deferred to 1 May 1707, the amended articles still had to be enacted at Westminster, and the Scottish Parliament kept sitting until 25 March.

1 May 1707: one kingdom, on schedule

Article I of the Union settlement took effect on 1 May 1707: the previously separate Kingdoms of England and Scotland became one state named Great Britain. Queen Anne, until then queen separately of each, became the single monarch of the new state.

British records and almost all historical accounts use 1 May, the Julian date then in force. Its Gregorian equivalent was 12 May — the same physical day under a different calendar.

A Parliament that did not sit

The settlement provided that Great Britain would be represented by one Parliament of Great Britain, replacing the separate English and Scottish legislatures. It existed legally from 1 May, and did not assemble.

A proclamation of 5 June called it to meet at Westminster on 23 October. Scotland's share of it was 45 members of the Commons and 16 representative peers.

Celebrated in one capital

London marked the Union with Queen Anne's procession and a thanksgiving service at St Paul's Cathedral. No official celebration was imposed in Edinburgh.

Nor did the day erase institutional distinctions: Scottish private law, courts and the Presbyterian establishment were specifically preserved. The old Scottish Parliament had last met on 25 March and was formally dissolved before 1 May arrived.

8 July 1709: an attack ordered by a wounded king

Near Poltava in the Cossack Hetmanate on 8 July 1709, Charles XII ordered a pre-emptive attack on Peter I's fortified encampment after learning that Russian reinforcements were reportedly approaching. His foot wound had disabled him, so Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Rehnskiöld exercised Swedish tactical command.

The same day carries three correct dates: 27 June in the Julian calendar Russia used, 28 June in Sweden's own temporary calendar, and 8 July Gregorian.

The redoubts, then the rout

Swedish infantry advanced early in the morning, captured two Russian redoubts but failed to hold them, and became divided while trying to pass the defensive works. Carl Gustaf Roos's detached battalions were cut off and surrendered.

After the armies regrouped, Russian artillery and infantry broke the Swedish formation. By about 11 a.m. the Swedish field army had been routed, with Rehnskiöld and the royal minister Carl Piper among those captured.

Three days to the capitulation

The Encyclopedia of Ukraine account puts Peter's force at 42,500 soldiers and 102 cannon against a Swedish army of 31,000 that took only four guns forward with the attack. It counts more than 9,300 Swedish dead and nearly 2,900 captured, against 1,345 Russian dead and 3,290 wounded; the totals differ across Swedish, Russian and Ukrainian accounts.

Surviving Swedish units withdrew south along the Vorskla. Within three days Charles XII, Ivan Mazepa and a mixed Swedish-Cossack contingent had crossed the Dnipro, while about 16,000 men under Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt capitulated at Perevolochna.

1 August 1714: an accession at 7:45 in the morning

Queen Anne died at Kensington Palace at about 7:45 a.m. on 1 August 1714 — the British Old Style date, 12 August in the Gregorian calendar — without surviving children. Under the statutory Protestant succession, the crowns passed immediately to Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, as George I.

Sophia of Hanover, the heir the Act of Settlement had named, had died two months before Anne. George inherited as her Protestant heir, ahead of roughly 50 Roman Catholic relatives with stronger hereditary claims.

Proclaimed in his absence

The Privy Council met, adapted the established accession proclamation, and declared the Elector lawful king of Great Britain, France and Ireland. It was issued in London that day, over more than 120 signatures.

George was still in Hanover. The regency arrangements were opened, and Lords Justices began administering the government in his name.

Forty-eight days to Greenwich

He took no oath and underwent no ceremony on the day he became king; the accession was automatic. George arrived at Greenwich on 18 September 1714 and was crowned on 20 October.

The accession on 1 August had already created a personal union of crowns, not a merger: Great Britain and Hanover remained separate states. And while the Stuart reign had ended, the Stuart claim had not: James Francis Edward Stuart and his Jacobite supporters went on challenging the Hanoverian succession.

Two friends and a press

Carl Linnaeus brought the manuscript to the Netherlands. The botanist Jan Frederik Gronovius and the Scottish physician Isaac Lawson both urged him to publish it; Gronovius helped finance the printing, and Lawson otherwise supported the production.

Johannes Wilhelm de Groot printed the book at Leiden for the bookseller Theodorus Haak. Linnaeus's almanac records that printing began on 30 June, the manuscript was finished on 15 July, and printing was ready on 13 December 1735.

Eleven folio pages

The work presented Linnaeus's classifications of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms in large tabular spreads organized through classes, orders, genera and species. The substantive text ran to eleven large folio pages, though counts vary between 11, 12 unnumbered and 13 facsimile pages depending on which leaves are included.

It was schematic, not descriptive, and it did not consistently apply binomial species names. The animal table placed Homo within the order Anthropomorpha — not the later Primates — alongside other manlike genera, and divided humanity into four geographical varieties distinguished principally by colour terms.

A date the title page does not give

The title page carries only the year. Bibliographical evidence places printing and publication between 9 and 13 December, and no single first-sale or release day is securely established. The manuscript's closing note is dated 23 July 1735, which is not the publication date.

Once printing was finished Haak sold copies in Leiden at 2½ guilders while Gronovius retained stock for distribution. Linnaeus was 28.