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On 1 August 1927, Communist officers seized Nanchang and lost the city four days later. The People's Liberation Army marks the defeat as its birthday, and a century later Beijing is still fighting the argument it settled that night: who gets to hold the gun.
On 31 July 1556, Ignatius of Loyola died in Rome. The Society of Jesus he founded had already gone global. It would later be suppressed by a pope, restored by another, and somehow survive into an age that barely remembers what Jesuits were.
On 30 July 1916, German saboteurs blew up a Jersey City munitions depot, scarring the Statue of Liberty and stopping a clock a mile away. Washington dismissed it as a regrettable accident. It took the United States another year to call it what it was.
On 29 July 1014, Basil II crushed the Bulgarian army at Kleidion and blinded thousands of prisoners, leaving one man in every hundred a single eye to lead the rest home. The battle didn't decide the war. The punishment decided how we'd remember it.
On 28 July 1942, with the Wehrmacht driving on Stalingrad, Stalin issued Order No. 227: retreat without written orders, and face a penal battalion, the Gulag, or a bullet from your own side. It may have helped save the front. That is not the same as justifying it.
Historians mistook the diaries of the rich for the lives of everyone. We are making the same mistake with modern data - we have just swapped one filter for a shinier one.
On 27 July 1794, the National Convention that Maximilien Robespierre had dominated for a year finally turned on him and had him arrested within the hour. He was dead less than two days later, undone partly by a state religion he had invented two months before, with himself as its prophet.
On 26 July 1529, the Spanish crown named Francisco Pizarro governor of a country Spain did not yet control. The illegitimate, illiterate son of an infantry officer had talked his way into ruling an empire he had only glimpsed from a boat - and shortchanged the partner who had helped him find it.
On 25 July 1467, cannon and hand-guns decided a battle in Italy for the first time, at Molinella near Bologna. The condottieri's genteel, low-casualty way of war - fought for ransom, not for blood - did not survive the encounter.
On 24th July 1783, Simón Bolívar was born in Caracas. He spent the next forty-seven years freeing six nations from Spain, then spent his last ones deciding those same nations could not be trusted with the liberty he had won them.