25 juli

The general Alexios Strategopoulos, scouting with a small force, found the Latin garrison away and slipped in through a passage by the Gate of the Spring. Michael VIII entered on 15 August, walking behind an icon of the Virgin.

Count Baldwin of Flanders was crowned emperor in Hagia Sophia, and Venice took three-eighths of the empire. The Greeks of Nicaea retook the city in 1261.

Henry VI laid the first stone himself on St James’s Day 1446. The Wars of the Roses starved the site; Henry VII paid for it to resume, and John Wastell closed it with the largest fan vault in the world between 1512 and 1515.

The Protestant heir to the throne heard Mass at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, and Catholic Paris opened its gates to him the next year. The line “Paris is well worth a Mass” is attributed to him, but there is no evidence he said it.

The nativs have ingraved on the face of this rock the figures of animals &c. near which I marked my name and the day of the month & year. — Clark He named the rock “Pompy’s Tower” after Sacagawea’s son. His carved “Wm Clark July 25 1806” is the only physical mark the expedition left that can still…

Six weeks after their patent, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone sent signals along the new London and Birmingham Railway from Euston to Camden Town. Their instrument needed no code: five needles pointed to letters on a diamond-shaped grid. It had room for only twenty, so C, J, Q, U, X and Z…

Fought over control of Korea. Japan won at Pyongyang and off the Yalu and took Port Arthur, where its troops killed large numbers of Chinese soldiers and civilians after the capture, as Western correspondents reported.

Louis Blériot took off at dawn from near Calais in his Type XI monoplane, without a compass, and landed about 37 minutes later in a meadow beside Dover Castle, winning the Daily Mail’s £1,000 prize. Britain, newspapers said, was no longer an island.

Gino Bartali had won in 1938. His second Tour, ten years after the first, is the longest gap between two wins.

Four freshmen from North Carolina A&T, Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond, sat down at Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter and stayed until closing. Sit-ins spread to dozens of Southern cities within weeks. When the store gave in on 25 July, the first Black…

The first Games without a boycott since 1972. Germany came as one team, the former Soviet republics as the Unified Team, and South Africa returned after thirty-two years of exclusion for apartheid.

On take-off from Charles de Gaulle, a tyre ran over a metal strip that had fallen from a Continental DC-10. Tyre debris ruptured a fuel tank and the leaking fuel caught fire. The aircraft came down on a hotel two minutes later, killing 113 people: all 109 on board and four on the ground. It was…