On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan took decisive action that would become one of the most consequential labor decisions in American history. With the stroke of a pen and the full force of executive leadership, Reagan fired 11,359 air traffic controllers who had…
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On August 4, 1914, the contours of what would become the First World War changed dramatically as three pivotal nations made their positions unmistakably clear. In response to Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium, both Belgium and the British Empire formally declared war on the…
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On August 3, 1949, a meeting in New York City changed the course of American sports history. Officials from the Basketball Association of America (BAA) and the National Basketball League (NBL), two rival professional basketball circuits, agreed to a merger that would create the…
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On August 2, 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of World War II, physicist Albert Einstein and fellow Hungarian émigré Leo Szilard co-signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that would become one of the most consequential pieces of correspondence in history. The…
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On August 1, 1800, the Acts of Union were passed by the parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland, legally binding the two into a single political entity: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The union, which took effect on January 1, 1801,…
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On July 31, 1790, the fledgling United States took a decisive step toward promoting innovation and industrial progress: it issued its first patent. The recipient was Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia, who secured legal recognition for a novel process of making potash—an essential ingredient in…
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On the morning of July 30, 1864, Union forces launched a bold yet catastrophically mishandled attempt to break the Confederate lines outside Petersburg, Virginia—an effort that would become known as the Battle of the Crater. As part of the larger Petersburg Campaign, the battle…
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On July 29, 587 BC, after months of siege, the Neo-Babylonian Empire broke through the walls of Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple—marking the violent end of the Kingdom of Judah and the beginning of the Babylonian Exile. The conquest, led by King Nebuchadnezzar…
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On July 28, 1794 (10 Thermidor, Year II in the insane French Revolution calendar), Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of the French Revolution’s most radical and blood-soaked phase, was executed by guillotine in Paris. Alongside him fell his loyal lieutenant Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and…
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On July 27, 1299, a frontier chieftain named Osman I led his warriors across the Byzantine border and launched a raid into the territory of Nicomedia, a strategic outpost in northwestern Anatolia. According to Edward Gibbon, the English historian best known for The History…
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