1545The Mary Rose sinks in the Solent as Henry VIII watches
The Mary Rose was one of the first great warships of Henry VIII’s navy, launched in 1511 and rebuilt to carry heavy guns firing through lidded ports cut low in her hull. In the summer of 1545 England was at war with France, and a French invasion fleet of more than 200 ships sailed into the Solent, the strait between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, far outnumbering the English ships sent out to meet it.
On 19 July 1545, with the king watching from the shore near Southsea Castle, the Mary Rose fired a broadside and began to turn. She heeled over, water poured through her open gunports and she sank within minutes. Whether a gust of wind, French fire or a crowded, top-heavy ship was to blame is still debated. Only about 30 of the roughly 400 men aboard survived. The French invasion came to nothing, and in 1982 the surviving half of her hull was raised from the seabed; it is now displayed in Portsmouth.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Mary Rose Trust: Why did the Mary Rose sink? ↗
1848The first women’s rights convention opens at Seneca Falls
In the United States of the 1840s women could not vote, a married woman’s property and earnings usually belonged to her husband, and most colleges and professions were closed to women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young mother living in the small mill town of Seneca Falls, New York, met the Quaker preacher Lucretia Mott and three other women over tea in July 1848, and together they decided to call a public meeting on the ‘social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman’.
It opened in the Wesleyan Chapel on 19 July 1848, and about 300 people came over two days. The women’s Declaration of Sentiments, modelled on the Declaration of Independence, listed their grievances, and 100 people signed it, including the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The call for women’s right to vote was the most controversial of the resolutions and only just passed. Seneca Falls is remembered as the start of the organised campaign for women’s rights in the United States.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Park Service: Declaration of Sentiments, the first women’s rights convention ↗
1864Qing troops storm Nanjing, ending the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
The Taiping Rebellion began in southern China in 1850, led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed candidate in the imperial examinations who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. His followers swept north and in 1853 took Nanjing, which became Tianjing, the Heavenly Capital of their kingdom. The war against the Qing dynasty that followed was one of the deadliest in history; estimates of the dead run to 20 million or more.
By 1864 the Qing armies of Zeng Guofan had closed around the city, and his brother Zeng Guoquan had been besieging it for two years. Hong Xiuquan died in June. On 19 July 1864 the besiegers exploded mines under the wall, brought down a long section of it and poured into the city, and the fighting and killing that followed went on for days. The fall of Nanjing broke the Taiping movement, although scattered armies fought on for some time.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Third Battle of Nanjing ↗
1870France declares war on Prussia
In 1870 Spain offered its vacant throne to Prince Leopold, a Catholic cousin of the King of Prussia, and France, alarmed at the thought of Prussian princes on two of its borders, objected fiercely. Leopold withdrew, but the French ambassador then pressed King Wilhelm I at the spa town of Ems for a promise that the candidacy would never be renewed. Wilhelm refused politely, and the Prussian minister-president Otto von Bismarck published a shortened account of the meeting that made the exchange sound like an insult.
Paris erupted, and Napoleon III’s government, led by Émile Ollivier, who told the chamber he accepted the responsibility ‘with a light heart’, asked for war credits. On 19 July 1870 France formally declared war on Prussia. The south German states joined Prussia, and within weeks German armies had won a string of victories. Napoleon III was captured at Sedan in September, his empire fell, and in January 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Franco-German War ↗
1979The Sandinistas enter Managua after Somoza’s fall
The Somoza family had ruled Nicaragua since the 1930s, backed by the National Guard and for most of that time by the United States. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, named after Augusto Sandino, who had fought US Marines in the 1920s and 1930s, began a guerrilla war in the 1960s. Anger grew after the dictatorship pocketed much of the aid sent after the 1972 Managua earthquake, and the murder of the newspaper editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro in 1978 turned much of the country against Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
By June 1979 the Sandinistas and their allies held most of Nicaragua outside the capital. Somoza resigned and flew to Miami on 17 July, and on 19 July 1979 Sandinista columns entered Managua to cheering crowds; a revolutionary junta took power the next day. The war had cost tens of thousands of lives. In the 1980s the Sandinista government fought US-backed Contra rebels, and 19 July is still celebrated in Nicaragua as Liberation Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Department of State, Office of the Historian: Central America, 1977-1980 ↗
