Alice Pemberton: In nineteen thirty-six, Franklin D. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen ninety-three, Léon Theremin dies, the Russian physicist and engineer whose invention still carries his name: the theremin. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen sixty-seven, the Battle of Dak To begins in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, where American and North Vietnamese forces fight for control of the hills. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the third of November. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on the day an English king took the pope's job by Act of Parliament; Arthur Nightingale on the woman John Stuart Mill called the guide of all his actions; Vivian Hale on a constitution nobody has changed; Rufus McCrae reads a banker's account of Florence under water; and at the table, a grudge that built a car company. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: On this day in fifteen thirty-four, an English king took the pope's job, and he needed a vote to get it. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: The vote is the whole story. At Westminster, on the opening day of its final session, the Reformation Parliament passed the first Act of Supremacy. It made Henry the Eighth head of the Church of England. The pope, and the Catholic Church with him, were written out of English law. Alice Pemberton: Written out by statute rather than by the sword. Why go through Parliament at all? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Because a statute binds. Henry could quarrel with Rome on his own, but he needed Lords and Commons to make the break the law of the land. The Act of Supremacy went onto the Parliament Roll and into the Statutes of the Realm, where you can still read it. Alice Pemberton: So the king won. Professor Edmund Cavendish: Henry won the argument. Parliament won the precedent. Once the Act of Supremacy proved that Lords and Commons could decide who headed the Church, the next question asked itself: who heads the realm? Little more than a century later, the same institution put a king, Charles the First, on trial. Alice Pemberton: On this day in eighteen fifty-eight, in a hotel in Avignon, the woman John Stuart Mill called the guide of all his actions died. Her name was Harriet Taylor Mill. Our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: The guide of all his actions. Mill wrote it to a friend within days: 'My Wife, the companion of all my feelings, the prompter of all my best thoughts, the guide of all my actions, is gone!' The doctor and her daughter Helen were both sent for. Both arrived too late. Alice Pemberton: Who was she before Mill? Arthur Nightingale: Harriet Hardy, a surgeon's daughter from Walworth in south London, taught at home, writing poetry and drifting toward the free-thinkers of a Unitarian chapel. At eighteen she married a merchant, John Taylor. Three children followed. Then the Taylors invited a young philosopher to dinner. Alice Pemberton: John Stuart Mill. Arthur Nightingale: Who treated Harriet Taylor, for once, as an intellectual equal. When she tried to end the friendship, he refused her 'eternal adieu': 'her path and mine are separated, she says; but they can, they must, meet again.' Soon they were trading essays on marriage, and hers was the braver. Women, she wrote, 'are educated for one single object, to gain their living by marrying.' And on divorce: 'who would wish to have the person without the inclination?' Alice Pemberton: And in the end they married. Arthur Nightingale: Two decades of friendship. Then, after John Taylor died, marriage, and barely seven years of it. Mill bought a cottage near her Avignon grave so he could visit it every day. And Harriet Taylor Mill's own writing? Several pieces still sit inside his collected works. The woman who argued that wives vanish into marriage, shelved under her husband's name. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen forty-six, the Emperor of Japan put his seal to a constitution written largely by his conquerors. For the inflection point, our economist, Vivian Hale. Vivian? Vivian Hale: His conquerors wrote it because of a single decision that February. General Douglas MacArthur had told Prime Minister Shidehara to draft a new constitution, and a committee of Japanese scholars set to work. Then MacArthur reversed course and handed over a draft made under his own supervision. Alice Pemberton: So the scholars were sidelined? Vivian Hale: Demoted to editors. They reviewed and modified the American text, the Imperial Diet passed it, and the Constitution of Japan was promulgated. Hirohito's rescript reads: 'I rejoice that the foundation for the construction of a new Japan has been laid according to the will of the Japanese people.' Alice Pemberton: And the cascade? Vivian Hale: The emperor became 'the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people.' Article Nine renounced war and armed forces. Now the number: zero. Despite every push by nationalists to rewrite Article Nine, the Constitution of Japan has never been amended, the oldest unamended constitutional text in the world. The document Japan didn't write is the one it has never agreed to change. Alice Pemberton: In November thirteen thirty-three, the River Arno drowned Florence, and a banker took notes. For the bookshelf, our resident reader and sceptic, Rufus McCrae. Rufus? Rufus McCrae: A banker, a diplomat, and the finest chronicler the city ever had: Giovanni Villani. Book Twelve of his Nuova Cronica opens with Florence 'in grande potenzia, e in felice e buono stato', powerful, happy, better off than it had been all century. You can feel the next sentence coming. Alice Pemberton: And the next sentence is God. Rufus McCrae: Quoting the Gospel, no less: keep watch, for you know not the day nor the hour. The rain starts on All Saints' Day and runs four days and four nights, 'che pareano aperte le cataratte del cielo', as if the floodgates of heaven had opened. The Arno takes mills, trees, houses and people on its way into the city. Alice Pemberton: Divine judgment, then. Rufus McCrae: That's the sermon. But Villani was a banker, and bankers check the books. He also blames the mill dams across the river, which had raised its bed through Florence. God sent the rain; Florentine industry built the bathtub. Alice Pemberton: Did anyone listen? Rufus McCrae: The Arno kept flooding Florence for centuries. On the fourth of November, nineteen sixty-six, it broke the embankment again and damaged millions of works of art and rare books. Villani wrote the flood into a book; six centuries later, the river came back for the books. Alice Pemberton: At the table: our old newspaperman, Bradford Winslow; our markets correspondent, Gwen Harmon; and our Asia correspondent, Raj Sharma. Bradford, you brought a first edition. Bradford Winslow: In eighteen thirty-eight, the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce went to press, twice a week. Its first editor, a retired Irish doctor, died the next year. The paper didn't. We know it as The Times of India. Raj Sharma: And look who backed it, Bradford: European merchant houses, yes, but also the Parsi merchant Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. Bombay money from the very first edition. Gwen Harmon: 'Journal of Commerce' in the title. My kind of founding document. Alice Pemberton: Gwen, yours has four wheels. Gwen Harmon: In nineteen eleven, a Swiss racing driver, Louis Chevrolet, and the man General Motors had thrown out, William Durant, start the Chevrolet Motor Car Company in Detroit. Within seven years Durant uses it to buy back control of GM. Revenge, with a radiator grille. Bradford Winslow: Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to that man's balance sheet. Raj Sharma: Mine is quieter. In eighteen eighty, Japan's anthem, Kimigayo, was first performed to its current melody, at the Imperial Palace on Emperor Meiji's birthday. The words are a Heian-era poem, the oldest lyrics of any national anthem. The tune came from court gagaku, harmonised by a German bandmaster, Franz Eckert. Gwen Harmon: The oldest words in the anthem business, and they hired a German arranger. Raj Sharma: Only because the first melody was so unpopular they had to replace it. And a second from me: in nineteen sixty-one, U Thant of Burma became Secretary-General of the United Nations, the first from outside Europe. The General Assembly voted unanimously, by secret ballot, and he walked to the dais through a standing ovation. Gwen Harmon: Unanimous, by secret ballot. No market on earth agrees with itself like that. Bradford Winslow: Then I'll close on the loudest silence in politics. In nineteen sixty-nine, Richard Nixon went on television about Vietnam, with a speech he'd drafted himself on yellow legal pads, and said: 'to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.' Raj Sharma: A majority defined by saying nothing. Very convenient for the man doing the talking. Bradford Winslow: Every editor knows the trick, Raj. The readers who never write in always agree with you. Alice Pemberton: A paper that outlived its editor, a car built on a grudge, a song older than its nation's anthem, and a majority that never said a word. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the third of November — where in eighteen sixty-eight John Willis Menard of Louisiana became the first African American elected to Congress, and was never allowed to take his seat; where in ten ninety the English king William Rufus tried to seize his own brother's capital, Rouen, and failed; and, more recently, where in nineteen ninety-two Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, unseated a sitting president, George H. W. Bush. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: What they didn't tell you: in seventeen ninety-one, the University of Vermont was chartered, the first American college whose charter refused to prefer any religious sect. Mortimer Finch: Very enlightened. And who taught there? Humphrey Thwaite: One man. Its first president, Daniel Sanders, was the entire faculty for seven years. Mortimer Finch: So every lecture, every exam, every faculty meeting — Humphrey Thwaite: Unanimous, Mortimer. Every single time.