708 – Copper coins are minted in Japan for the first time (Traditional Japanese date: August 10, 708).
1315 – Battle of Montecatini: The army of the Republic of Pisa, commanded by Uguccione della Faggiuola, wins a decisive victory against the joint forces of the Kingdom of Naples and the Republic of Florence despite being outnumbered.
1350 – Battle of Winchelsea (or Les Espagnols sur Mer): The English naval fleet under King Edward III defeats a Castilian fleet of 40 ships.
1475 – The Treaty of Picquigny ends a brief war between the kingdoms of France and England.
1484 – Pope Innocent VIII succeeds Pope Sixtus IV.
1498 – Vasco da Gama decides to depart Calicut and return to Kingdom of Portugal.
1521 – The Ottoman Turks capture Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade).
1526 – Battle of Mohács: The Ottoman Turks led by Suleiman the Magnificent defeat and kill the last Jagiellonian king of Hungary and Bohemia.
1541 – The Ottoman Turks capture Buda, the capital of the Hungarian Kingdom.
1728 – The city of Nuuk in Greenland is founded as the fort of Godt-Haab by the royal governor Claus Paarss.
1756 – Frederick the Great attacks Saxony, beginning the Seven Years’ War.
1778 – American Revolutionary War: British and American forces battle indecisively at the Battle of Rhode Island.
1786 – Shays’s Rebellion, an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers, begins in response to high debt and tax burdens.
1807 – British troops under Sir Arthur Wellesley defeat a Danish militia outside Copenhagen in the Battle of Køge.
1825 – Kingdom of Portugal recognizes the Independence of Brazil.
1831 – Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction.
1842 – Treaty of Nanking signing ends the First Opium War.
1861 – American Civil War: United States Navy squadron captures forts at Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina.
1869 – The Mount Washington Cog Railway opens, making it the world’s first mountain-climbing rack railway.
1871 – Emperor Meiji orders the abolition of the han system and the establishment of prefectures as local centers of administration. (Traditional Japanese date: July 14, 1871).
1903 – The Slava, the last of the five Borodino-class battleships, is launched.
1910 – The Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910, also known as the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, becomes effective, officially starting the period of Japanese rule in Korea.
1911 – Ishi, considered the last Native American to make contact with European Americans, emerges from the wilderness of northeastern California.
1914 – Start of the Battle of St. Quentin in which the French Fifth Army counter-attacked the invading Germans at Saint-Quentin, Aisne.
1915 – US Navy salvage divers raise F-4, the first U.S. submarine sunk in an accident.
1918 – Bapaume taken by the New Zealand Division in the Hundred Days Offensive.
1941 – Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is occupied by Nazi Germany following an occupation by the Soviet Union.
1943 – German-occupied Denmark scuttles most of its navy; Germany dissolves the Danish government.
1944 – Slovak National Uprising takes place as 60,000 Slovak troops turn against the Nazis.
1946 – USS Nevada is decommissioned.
1949 – Soviet atomic bomb project: The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb, known as First Lightning or Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.
1950 – Korean War: British troops arrive in Korea to bolster the US presence there.
1958 – United States Air Force Academy opens in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
1965 – The Gemini V spacecraft returns to Earth, landing in the Atlantic ocean.
1966 – Leading Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb is executed for plotting the assassination of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
1970 – Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, East Los Angeles, California. Police riot kills three people, including journalist Rubén Salazar.
1982 – The synthetic chemical element Meitnerium, atomic number 109, is first synthesized at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany.
1991 – Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union suspends all activities of the Soviet Communist Party.
1996 – Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes into a mountain on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, killing all 141 aboard.
2003 – Ayatollah Sayed Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the Shia Muslim leader in Iraq, is assassinated in a terrorist bombing, along with nearly 100 worshippers as they leave a mosque in Najaf.
2007 – 2007 United States Air Force nuclear weapons incident: Six US cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads are flown without proper authorization from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base.