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Today is September11, 2026 Friday.

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The World in 1947 the year an empire ended at midnight

About 15 million people left home in the months around partition. That is close to everyone in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles setting out on the same roads in the same summer.

Life back then

In August trains crossed a brand new border in both directions, and families had hours to decide what they could carry. The partition of India and Pakistan moved millions of people either way. Britain spent February in the dark, with the coldest weather anyone could remember, coal trains stuck in drifts and factories shut for weeks. American couples doubled up with in-laws because there was nowhere to live, and women queued around the block when a store got nylon stockings in again. Six men on a balsa raft drifted from Peru to Polynesia that summer to show the islands could have been settled that way.

The year in 8 events

• 👗Feb 12 Christian Dior shows his first collection in Paris. The long full skirts are called the New Look.
• ⚾Apr 15 Jackie Robinson plays his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball's colour line.
• 📜May 3 Japan's new constitution takes effect. The country gives up the right to go to war.
• 🌾Jun 5 George Marshall proposes American money to rebuild Europe, in a speech at Harvard.
• 🌏Aug 15 British rule in India ends. India becomes independent a day after Pakistan.
• ✈️Oct 14 Chuck Yeager flies the X-1 faster than sound over the California desert.
• 💍Nov 20 Princess Elizabeth marries Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.
• 🔬Dec 23 Scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey demonstrate the transistor, a tiny switch that will replace the vacuum tube.

Who Was in Charge?

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