27 juli

Osman’s horsemen beat a Byzantine force near Nicomedia, on the date most historians accept. The Byzantine historian George Pachymeres recorded it, the first mention of Osman in any written source, and it brought warriors from all over the frontier to his side.

A company of subscribers lent William III £1.2 million at 8 per cent for his war with France and in return became a bank that could issue notes. It moved to Threadneedle Street in 1734.

The captains named the three rivers Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin. Their camp stood on the spot where Sacagawea had been captured: Hidatsa raiders had surprised her people here five years before and, by Lewis’s account, killed four men, four women and several boys and carried off the women and…

Lewis, George Drouillard and the brothers Joseph and Reubin Field had camped with eight young Piegan Blackfeet men. Lewis told them that the nations west of the mountains, the Blackfeet’s enemies, had agreed to peace and would trade with the Americans. At dawn the Piegan tried to take the party’s…

Liverpool had overtaken Bristol and London in the 1740s and sent out most British slaving voyages after. Captain Hugh Crow took this last ship to Bonny, the leading port of the Bight of Biafra, and sold his captives in Jamaica.

Brunel’s Great Eastern, the only ship big enough to carry the whole cable, paid it out from Valentia to Heart’s Content in two weeks. In September she grappled the 1865 cable, lost two and a half miles down, and finished it too: two working lines across the Atlantic. A message cost £1 a word, with…

Still no news of Jonathan, and Lucy walks more each night, so Mina is wakened often. Arthur has been called away to Ring to his father, who is seriously ill, and Lucy frets at the delay in seeing him.

The first Games to use electric timing and a public-address system, and the first with athletes from every inhabited continent. Japan came for the first time.

Coubertin’s last Games as president, in his own city. The first Olympic village housed the athletes, the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius was used for the first time, and Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell ran the races later told in Chariots of Fire.

The Czechoslovak had already won the 10,000 and the 5000 metres. He entered the marathon, his first ever, and won it by more than two minutes. The day he won the 5000, his wife Dana Zátopková won the javelin.

With Stalin’s consent, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea invaded the South across the 38th parallel. A United Nations force led by the Americans fought back to the Chinese border; China’s armies drove it south again, and the front settled near where it began. Estimates of the dead run from about 2.5 to 3…

After two years of talks, most of them over whether prisoners could refuse to go home, generals for the UN command, North Korea and China signed an armistice at Panmunjom. South Korea did not sign, and no peace treaty has followed: the two Koreas are still technically at war.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 27–11 for the first article, obstruction of justice, and adopted abuse of power and contempt of Congress on 29 and 30 July. He resigned before the full House voted.

Two Britons who avoided racing each other passed the record back and forth five times in six years, and three times in nine days in August 1981.

Eight years, one month and nine days.

A third Briton, at Bislett again. Cram set three world records in nineteen days that summer, at 1500 metres, the mile and 2000 metres.

A pipe bomb went off during a late-night concert, killing Alice Hawthorne and injuring 111 people; a cameraman died of a heart attack running to film it. The guard who found the bag, Richard Jewell, was wrongly named a suspect. Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty in 2005.

London became the first city to hold three Summer Games. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei sent women for the first time, so every team had women on it, and women’s boxing joined the programme.

The last stage climbed Montmartre three times, as the Olympic road race had; in driving rain the times were frozen about 50 kilometres out. Pogačar beat Vingegaard by 4 minutes 24 seconds.