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On 10 August 1519, Ferdinand Magellan's fleet left Seville to circle the globe. He died two-thirds of the way through, killed on a beach in the Philippines by a chieftain named Lapu-Lapu - about whom almost nothing certain is known, and who is now that country's first national hero.
On 9 August 378, Emperor Valens marched an exhausted army into a Gothic cavalry charge at Adrianople and lost two-thirds of it in an afternoon. His body was never recovered - fitting, since the disaster had started years earlier as an administrative failure, not a battle.
On 8 August 870, exactly a year after their nephew died, Louis the German and Charles the Bald finished carving up his kingdom - a split they had actually agreed to a year before he died. Charles the Bald, in particular, made a career out of showing up at family funerals with the paperwork ready.
In 2007 Mikhail Gorbachev sat for a Louis Vuitton campaign beside the Berlin Wall. The last Soviet leader with a soft leather bag: what becomes possible once a power stops believing its own story.
Joseph Marie Jacquard died on 7 August 1834, decades after a Lyon mob smashed his automated loom and sold it for scrap. The punched cards that survived became the ancestor of every computer running today.
On 6 August 1806, Francis II read a short proclamation from a Vienna balcony and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. Men had bribed and warred for that crown for a thousand years. It ended with a single reading, mostly to spite Napoleon.
On 5 August 1100, Henry I was crowned King of England, three days after his brother William Rufus died from an arrow in the New Forest. The rightful heir was on his way home from the Crusade. He arrived too late, and too honest, to matter.
On 4 August 1578, Sebastian of Portugal charged into a Moroccan army at Alcácer Quibir and vanished. Three kings died that afternoon. Portugal spent the next sixty years under Spain.
On 3 August 1948, Whittaker Chambers told HUAC that Alger Hiss had been a communist. Hiss denied it under oath, sued for libel, and lost everything when the evidence caught up with him - and, decades later, so did the archives.
On 2 August 338 BC, Philip II of Macedon crushed the combined armies of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea, ending Greek independence in a single afternoon. His son Alexander got the statues. Philip built the army, the treasury, and the war plan that made the conquests possible.