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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.
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.