What happened on 10 February?

15 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1763 Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years' War France cedes Canada and abandons its ambitions in India (keeping only trading posts); Britain becomes the dominant colonial power.
2. 2004 Kanye West's The College Dropout The producer behind Jay-Z's hits steps out as a rapper with soul samples and middle-class insecurity — a new template for hip hop.
3. 1949 Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller's tragedy of Willy Loman; benchmark of post-war American drama.
4. 1519 Cortés sails in defiance of orders With Cuba's governor rescinding his commission even as the ships load, Hernán Cortés puts to sea anyway — eleven ships, five hundred men, sixteen horses, and no legal authority wha
5. 1846 Anglo-Sikh War (Sobraon) British defeat the Sikh army at Sobraon, ending the First Anglo-Sikh War; Punjab annexed after the second war in 1849.
6. 1840 Marriage of Victoria and Albert Queen Victoria marries Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; partnership shapes the early Victorian era.
7. 1306 Robert the Bruce kills John Comyn Before the high altar of the Greyfriars church at Dumfries, Bruce stabs his rival John Comyn — a sacrilegious murder that leaves him no road but to seize the crown, which he does a
8. 1906 HMS Dreadnought launched Britain's all-big-gun battleship makes every other battleship obsolete overnight, fuelling the Anglo-German naval arms race.
9. 2006 Death of J Dilla The Detroit producer dies of a rare blood disease, aged 32.
10. 1898 Born: Bertolt Brecht German playwright of The Threepenny Opera; leading theorist of epic theatre.
11. 1814 Napoleon's Six Days' Campaign Outnumbered nearly two to one in the fields of Champagne, Napoleon wins four battles in six days with an army of teenagers — the 'Marie-Louises' — mauling Blücher's army corps by c
12. 1673 Molière's The Imaginary Invalid Molière plays the hypochondriac Argan in his last comedy; at the fourth performance on 17 February 1673 he collapses on stage coughing blood and dies that night.
13. 1948 Zhdanov decree on music The Party condemns Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian for 'formalism'; Prokofiev's works are banned, and his estranged wife is sent to the Gulag.
14. 1829 Dumas's Henri III and His Court A clerk at the Duc d'Orléans' office writes a historical drama that triumphs at the Comédie-Française, a year before Hugo's Hernani, launching Romantic theatre.
15. 1567 Murder of Lord Darnley Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley — husband of Mary, Queen of Scots — is found strangled after an explosion at Kirk o' Field in Edinburgh. Suspicion falls on the Earl of Bothwell and on M