• 1363 - Beginning date of the Battle of Lake Poyang; the forces of two Chinese rebel leaders— Chen Youliang and Zhu Yuanzhang—are pitted against each other in what was one of the largest naval battles in history, during the last decade of the ailing, Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty.
• 1574 - Guru Ram Das became the Fourth Sikh Guru/Master.
• 1590 - Tokugawa Ieyasu enters Edo Castle. (Traditional Japanese date: August 1, 1590)
• 1791 - The HMS Pandora sank after running aground on a reef the previous day.
• 1799 - Capture of the entire Dutch fleet by British forces under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby and Admiral Sir Charles Mitchell during the Second Coalition of the French Revolutionary Wars.
• 1800 - Gabriel Prosser leads a slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia
• 1813 - Battle of Kulm: French forces defeated by Austrian-Prussian-Russian alliance.
• 1813 - Creek War: Creek Red Sticks carried out the Fort Mims Massacre.
• 1835 - Melbourne, Australia is founded.
• 1836 - The city of Houston is founded by Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen
• 1862 - American Civil War: Battle of Richmond: Confederates under Edmund Kirby Smith rout a Union army under General Horatio Wright.
• 1862 - American Civil War: Union forces are defeated in Second Battle of Bull Run.
• 1873 - Austrian explorers Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht discover the archipelago of Franz Joseph Land in the Arctic Sea.
• 1897 - The town of Ambiky is captured by France from Menabe in Madagascar.
• 1896 - Eight provinces in the Philippines were declared under martial law by the Spanish Governor General Ramon Blanco. This included the provinces of Batangas, Rizal, Cavite, Nueva Ecija as well as the nearby areas.
• 1909 - Burgess Shale fossils discovered by Charles Doolittle Walcott.
• 1914 - Battle of Tannenberg.
• 1918 - Fanya Kaplan, an assassin, shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. This, along with the assassination of Bolshevik senior official Moisei Uritsky days earlier, prompts the decree for Red Terror.
• 1922 - Battle of Dumlupinar, final battle in Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) ("Turkish War of Independence").
• 1941 - World War II: Siege of Leningrad begins.
• 1942 - World War II: Battle of Alam Halfa begins.
• 1945 - Hong Kong is liberated from Japan by British Armed Forces.
• 1945 - Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Douglas MacArthur lands at Atsugi Air Force Base.
• 1956 - Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opens.
• 1962 - Japan conducts a test of the NAMC YS-11, its first aircraft since the war and its only successful commercial aircraft from before or after the war.
• 1963 - Hotline between U.S. and Soviet leaders goes into operation.
• 1967 - Thurgood Marshall is confirmed as the first African American Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
• 1974 - A Belgrade-Dortmund express train derails at the main train station in Zagreb killing 153 passengers.
• 1974 - Powerful bomb explodes at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters in Marunouchi, Tokyo, Japan. 8 killed, 378 injured. Eight left-wing activists are arrested on May 19, 1975 by Japanese authorities.
• 1984 - STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery takes off on its maiden voyage.
• 1990 - Tatarstan declares independence from the RSFSR.
• 1999 - East Timorese vote for independence in a referendum.

Births