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Explore 14 July

Explore 14 July: Parisians storm the Bastille, Jan Žižka saves Prague on Vítkov Hill, Iraq’s monarchy falls, Jane Goodall reaches Gombe and New Horizons sweeps past Pluto. Born today: Poliziano, Ingmar Bergman and Angélique Kidjo.

This day through time →13 verified events across 5 eras

⌛13Full
Timeline ◈5Historic
Moments ♙8Born
Today ✦5Lives
Remembered ◉1Firsts &
Discoveries ☆1Sporting
Moments ♫1Culture
Stories ☉1Observances
The Hussites driving the crusaders off Vítkov Hill on 14 July 1420, in a 19th-century picture by Adolf Liebscher
The Hussites driving the crusaders off Vítkov Hill on 14 July 1420, in a 19th-century picture by Adolf Liebscher
Image creditAdolf Liebscher · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1420

Jan Žižka’s Hussites save Prague on Vítkov Hill

The Czech preacher Jan Hus was burned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415, and his followers in Bohemia, the Hussites, rose against the Church and against Sigismund, the king of Hungary and heir to the Bohemian crown. In 1420 the pope proclaimed a crusade against them, and Sigismund led a large army of German, Hungarian and Bohemian Catholic knights to Prague to take the city.

The Hussites held Vítkov, a narrow ridge just east of Prague that guarded the city’s supply route. Its defenders were few, commanded by the one-eyed veteran Jan Žižka, and on 14 July 1420 the crusaders’ cavalry attacked their hasty earthworks. The defenders held, and when Hussite troops and townspeople from Prague struck the attackers in the flank, the knights were driven down the steep slopes, some drowning in the Vltava. Sigismund soon withdrew. The victory made Žižka a national hero, and the hill, and later the whole district, took his name: Žižkov.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Prague City Tourism: National Memorial on Vítkov Hill ↗
The storming of the Bastille, in a painting by an unknown artist of the time
The storming of the Bastille, in a painting by an unknown artist of the time
Image creditUnidentified painter · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1789

Parisians storm the Bastille

By July 1789 France was bankrupt, bread was dear, and the Estates-General summoned by Louis XVI had turned itself into a National Assembly that claimed to speak for the nation. Royal troops were gathering around Paris, and when the king dismissed his popular finance minister, Jacques Necker, on 11 July, Parisians feared that the Assembly was about to be crushed. Crowds seized arms, and on the morning of 14 July they took muskets from the Invalides.

They then marched on the Bastille, a medieval fortress used as a state prison, to find gunpowder. Its governor, the Marquis de Launay, refused to hand it over, his men opened fire, and after hours of fighting, joined by mutinous soldiers with cannon, the crowd forced the garrison to surrender. Around a hundred attackers died. Only seven prisoners were found inside, but de Launay was killed and his head paraded on a pike. The fortress was soon demolished, and its fall became the great symbol of the French Revolution.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Bastille ↗
Abd al-Karim Qasim, leader of the revolution and Iraq's first prime minister as a republic, in 1960
Abd al-Karim Qasim, leader of the revolution and Iraq’s first prime minister as a republic, in 1960
Image creditوزارة المعارف العراقية · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1958

Army officers overthrow Iraq’s monarchy

Iraq had been a kingdom since 1921, under a Hashemite dynasty installed by Britain. By the 1950s the young King Faisal II reigned, but power lay with his uncle, the former regent Abd al-Ilah, and the veteran prime minister Nuri al-Said, who kept Iraq tied to Britain and the West. Many Iraqis, and a secret group of ‘Free Officers’ in the army, were inspired instead by the Arab nationalism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In July 1958 the government ordered a brigade to Jordan. Its route took it through Baghdad, and the officers Abd al-Karim Qasim and Abd al-Salam Arif used the move to seize the capital at dawn on 14 July. They proclaimed a republic, and the king, the crown prince and other members of the royal family were killed at the palace; Nuri al-Said was killed the next day. Qasim became prime minister. The revolution ended British influence in Iraq, and Iraq long marked 14 July as its national day.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Abd al-Karim Qasim ↗
A sculpture of Jane Goodall with David Greybeard, the Gombe chimpanzee who first let her watch him use tools
A sculpture of Jane Goodall with David Greybeard, the Gombe chimpanzee who first let her watch him use tools
Image creditGeary · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
1960

Jane Goodall arrives at Gombe to study chimpanzees

Jane Goodall had no university degree when the Kenyan palaeontologist Louis Leakey took her on as a secretary and then chose her to study wild chimpanzees, whose behaviour he hoped would shed light on early humans. The site was the Gombe Stream Game Reserve on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, in what was then British-ruled Tanganyika. The authorities would not let a young woman go alone, so her mother went with her.

On 14 July 1960, aged 26, Goodall stepped ashore at Gombe with a tent and a cheap pair of binoculars. For months the chimpanzees fled from her, but in time she was accepted, and that autumn she watched a male she named David Greybeard strip leaves from a twig and use it to fish termites from a mound. Toolmaking had been thought to be unique to humans. Her study at Gombe became one of the longest-running of any wild animal, and 14 July is now marked as World Chimpanzee Day.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Jane Goodall Institute: Gombe Stream Research Center ↗
A map of Honduras and its neighbour El Salvador, the two sides in the war of July 1969
A map of Honduras and its neighbour El Salvador, the two sides in the war of July 1969
Image creditJuanJose1969 · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
1969

The Football War breaks out between El Salvador and Honduras

El Salvador was small and crowded, and by the 1960s some 300,000 Salvadorans had crossed into larger, emptier Honduras to farm and work. In 1969 Honduras began a land reform that took land from Salvadoran settlers and drove many of them out, and relations between the two governments turned hostile. In June the two national teams met in a three-game World Cup qualifying series, marked by violence between fans, and El Salvador won the deciding match.

On 14 July 1969 the Salvadoran air force bombed Honduran airfields and its army invaded, taking several towns. Honduras hit back from the air, and after about four days the Organization of American States arranged a ceasefire; Salvadoran troops withdrew in early August. The war, remembered as the Football War or the Hundred Hours War, killed a few thousand people, most of them civilians, and left tens of thousands of Salvadorans displaced. A peace treaty was not signed until 1980.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Football War ↗
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PEOPLE

Born Today

Poliziano
Image creditDomenico Ghirlandaio · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1454

Poliziano

Florentine poet and classical scholar in the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who tutored his children and wrote the Orfeo, one of the first secular plays in Italian.

Abbas II of Egypt
Image creditUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1874

Abbas II of Egypt

The last khedive of Egypt and Sudan, who clashed with British control of his country and was deposed by Britain in 1914 when the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War.

Plaek Phibunsongkhram
Image creditMinistry of Defence of Thailand · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1897

Plaek Phibunsongkhram

Thai field marshal and prime minister from 1938 to 1944 and again from 1948 to 1957, whose government changed the country’s name from Siam to Thailand in 1939.

Northrop Frye
Image creditAshoola · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1912

Northrop Frye

Canadian literary critic whose Anatomy of Criticism, published in 1957, made him one of the most influential scholars of literature of his century.

Natalia Ginzburg
Image creditUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1916

Natalia Ginzburg

Italian novelist and essayist whose spare, ironic books, among them Family Lexicon, drew on her family life in Turin under Fascism and the war.

Ingmar Bergman
Image creditJoost Evers / Anefo · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1918

Ingmar Bergman

Swedish film and stage director whose films, among them The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander, explored faith, death and family life.

Ei-ichi Negishi
Image creditHolger Motzkau · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1935

Ei-ichi Negishi

Japanese chemist who shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for palladium-catalysed reactions that join carbon atoms, now widely used to make medicines and materials.

Angélique Kidjo
Image creditLibrary of Congress Life · CC0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1960

Angélique Kidjo

Beninese singer and songwriter who blends West African music with funk, jazz and pop, and has won several Grammy Awards.

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IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

Pluto in true colour, pieced together from New Horizons images taken during the flyby, with the pale heart-shaped plain on its face
Pluto in true colour, pieced together from New Horizons images taken during the flyby, with the pale heart-shaped plain on its face
Image creditNASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Southwest Research Institute/Alex Parker · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
2015

New Horizons sweeps past Pluto

When NASA’s New Horizons probe was launched in January 2006, Pluto was still counted as the ninth planet and had never been seen as more than a blur of pixels. By the time the piano-sized spacecraft arrived, after more than nine years and about 3 billion miles, astronomers had reclassified it as a dwarf planet, but it remained the last of the classical planets never visited by a spacecraft.

At 11:50 GMT on 14 July 2015 New Horizons passed about 12,500 kilometres above Pluto’s surface, travelling at more than 49,000 kilometres an hour, and then flew on past its large moon Charon. Its pictures revealed a far more active world than expected: mountains of water ice, a vast smooth plain of nitrogen ice, later named Sputnik Planitia, that forms part of a bright heart-shaped region, and a thin blue haze. The spacecraft went on into the Kuiper Belt and flew past the small, distant object Arrokoth in 2019.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NASA: NASA’s three-billion-mile journey to Pluto reaches historic encounter ↗
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SPORTING HISTORY

Sporting Moments

Whymper's party reaching the summit of the Matterhorn, in an engraving by Gustave Doré
Whymper’s party reaching the summit of the Matterhorn, in an engraving by Gustave Doré
Image creditGustave Doré · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1865

Whymper’s party makes the first ascent of the Matterhorn

By the 1860s nearly all the great Alpine peaks had been climbed, but the steep pyramid of the Matterhorn, on the border between Switzerland and Italy, had defeated every attempt. The young English engraver Edward Whymper had tried seven times, and in July 1865 he was racing an Italian party led by the guide Jean-Antoine Carrel, who was climbing from the Italian side.

Whymper’s party of seven, with the Chamonix guide Michel Croz and the Zermatt guides Peter Taugwalder and his son, climbed the Hörnli ridge from Zermatt and reached the summit on 14 July 1865, ahead of the Italians. On the way down the inexperienced Douglas Hadow slipped and pulled Croz, Charles Hudson and Lord Francis Douglas with him; the rope broke, and all four fell to their deaths. The disaster made the climb notorious across Europe, and the Matterhorn became the most famous mountain in the Alps.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Edward Whymper ↗
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MUSIC • FILM • BOOKS • CULTURE

Culture Stories

The New York Crystal Palace, in a coloured print after its architect Karl Gildemeister
The New York Crystal Palace, in a coloured print after its architect Karl Gildemeister
Image creditAfter Karl Gildemeister (1820-1869) · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1853

America’s first world’s fair opens in New York

London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, had drawn millions of visitors, and a group of New York businessmen set out to match it. They built their own Crystal Palace, designed by Georg Carstensen and Karl Gildemeister, on a site beside the city’s reservoir at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street, where Bryant Park is today. The building, in the shape of a Greek cross, was crowned by a great dome.

The Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations was opened on 14 July 1853 by President Franklin Pierce. Thousands of exhibits from the United States and abroad filled the halls, from paintings and sculpture to machines and inventions, and the following year Elisha Otis demonstrated his safety lift there, cutting the rope of the platform he stood on. The fair lost money and closed in 1854, and the Crystal Palace burned down in 1858.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations ↗
✦
LIVES REMEMBERED

Remembered Today

Francisco de Miranda
Image creditMartin Tovar y Tovar · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1816

Francisco de Miranda

Venezuelan revolutionary who fought in the French Revolutionary wars and led Venezuela’s first republic in 1812; he died a prisoner of the Spanish at Cádiz.

Paul Kruger
Image creditUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1904

Paul Kruger

President of the South African Republic (the Transvaal) who led the Boers against Britain in the war of 1899 to 1902; he died in exile in Switzerland.

Alphonse Mucha
Image creditAlphonse Mucha · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1939

Alphonse Mucha

Czech artist whose posters for the actress Sarah Bernhardt defined the Art Nouveau style, and who later painted the twenty huge canvases of The Slav Epic.

Mark Oliphant
Image creditBassano Ltd · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 2000

Mark Oliphant

Australian physicist who helped discover nuclear fusion reactions in the 1930s, worked on radar and the atomic bomb in the war, and later became Governor of South Australia.

☉
AROUND THE WORLD

Observances & Anniversaries

The Patrouille de France trail the colours of the French flag over the Champs-Élysées during the Bastille Day parade in 2017
The Patrouille de France trail the colours of the French flag over the Champs-Élysées during the Bastille Day parade in 2017
Image creditChief Petty Officer Michael McNabb · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Annual

Bastille Day, France’s national day

France’s Fête nationale remembers two events: the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the Fête de la Fédération held a year later on the Champ de Mars in Paris, a great festival of national unity at which the king and the deputies swore loyalty to the nation and the law.

It became the official national holiday in 1880, under the Third Republic. The day is marked with a military parade on the Champs-Élysées in the morning, watched by the president, and with dances, often held in fire stations, and fireworks across the country in the evening.

Source: France Diplomatie: The 14th of July, Bastille Day ↗
HISTORY & TIMELINE

Finished the highlights?

Follow 14 July chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the modern day, with 13 verified events and the sources behind them.

This day through time →
Sources & further reading