Daily History Challenge · No. 126 · Sunday 1 November 2026 · Gauntlet
Puzzle No. 126: Gauntlet
The Sunday Gauntlet: three before or after calls, four events to order and a final When? on The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery in the United States.
Act 1: Chain, against Battle of Mingtiao and the Founding of the Shang Dynasty (1600 BCE)
After Battle of Mingtiao and the Founding of the Shang Dynasty
After Battle of Mingtiao and the Founding of the Shang Dynasty
After Battle of Mingtiao and the Founding of the Shang Dynasty
Act 2: Order, earliest first
Act 3: When?
Ratified on 6 December 1865 and proclaimed on 18 December, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, throughout the country and its territories. Passed by Congress on 31 January 1865 in the closing months of the Civil War, it gave permanent constitutional force to the emancipation that President Abraham Lincoln had begun with the wartime Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The amendment freed some four million enslaved African Americans and dismantled the legal foundation of the slaveholding South, whose defence of slavery had been the central cause of the war. As the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments, it was followed by measures guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights, though the promise of full equality was soon undermined by the collapse of Reconstruction, racial violence and the rise of segregation and exploitative labour systems. Even so, the abolition of slavery in the United States removed one of the largest slaveholding regimes in the world and reshaped the nation's economy, politics and society, leaving only Brazil and a handful of other states in the Americas yet to abolish the institution.