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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.
On 23 July 1903, the Ford Motor Company delivered its first car with $223.65 left in the bank - to a Chicago dentist whose surname, fittingly, is the German word for a small coin. Everything the company built afterwards, its rivals eventually copied.
On 22 July 1706, English and Scottish commissioners struck the deal behind the Acts of Union. Scotland's negotiators were men whose fortunes had been wrecked by the Darien disaster - and the treaty they signed paid them back for it.
On 21 July 356 BC, Herostratus burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus - one of the Seven Wonders - so the world would know his name. Ephesus banned that name. The ban failed. The bargain is still on offer.
On 20 July 1885, the Football Association legalised professionalism after northern clubs threatened to walk away. That surrender made the Football League - and the global game we still argue about - possible.
On 18 July 1566, Bartolomé de las Casas died in Madrid after fifty years spent prosecuting Spain's own conquest. He had begun as an encomendero in Hispaniola, and he never stopped being inconvenient - then to the colonists, now to almost everyone who tries to claim him.
On 18 July 1817, Georg Anton Schäffer was forced off Kauai after trying to seize the Hawaiian islands for the Russian-American Company. Everyone remembers Alaska. Almost nobody remembers how close Russia came to a Pacific enclave.