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On 8 July 1709, Peter the Great crushed Charles XII's Swedish army at Poltava. Charles fought from a litter with a bullet wound in his foot. Nine years of Swedish invincibility ended in an afternoon, and Russia stepped into the space it left behind.
On 7 July 1807, France and Russia signed the Treaty of Tilsit after a staged reconciliation on a raft in the Neman. Prussia was carved in half two days later. The alliance it built was the high point of Napoleon's power and the start of its unravelling.
Popular history says the AK-47 went into production on 6 July 1947. Soviet trial records say the rifle didn't exist yet that week, and had just failed its tests. What emerged from the redesign armed a hundred million people anyway.
On 5 July 1687, Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica came off the press in London. The Royal Society had already spent its year's budget on a book about fish, so Edmond Halley paid the printing costs himself and talked Newton out of pulling the whole thing over a priority dispute with Robert Hooke.
On 4 July 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, a treason confession from thirteen colonies with no army, no navy and no treasury. Two hundred and fifty years on, the doubters are still losing.
On 3 July 1908, Major Ahmed Niyazi raided an armoury in Macedonia and marched into the mountains demanding a constitution. Three weeks later Sultan Abdul Hamid II gave in. The men who forced him did not just modernise the Ottoman Empire - they eventually organised a genocide and dragged it into the First World War.
On 2 July 1823, a Portuguese garrison slipped out of Salvador aboard 83 ships after a 16-month siege, ending three centuries of colonial rule in Brazil. The war that actually won Brazil's independence looked nothing like the schoolbook version.
On 1 July 1997, Britain handed Hong Kong back to China after 156 years of colonial rule, closing the last major open account from the Opium Wars. Deng Xiaoping designed the deal but died four months before the flag came down, and the fifty-year promise he made has been fraying ever since.
On 30 June 1908, the largest impact event in recorded history exploded over Eastern Siberia. It flattened 2,150 km² of forest and left no crater. We are still arguing about what it was.
On 29 June 1849, Sergei Witte was born in Tiflis. As Russia's Minister of Finance he industrialised the empire, built the Trans-Siberian Railway, and drafted the October Manifesto that created a constitutional monarchy. Nicholas II fired him six months later.