On July 29, 1981, Lady Diana Spencer married Charles, Prince of Wales, at St Paul's Cathedral in London. Six hundred thousand people lined the processional route, and broadcasters estimated a global audience near 750 million. Behind the spectacle sat a five month engagement, a courtship bounded by rules of religion, rank, and reputation, and a bride who had already asked to stop.

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On July 28, 1915, a crowd in Port-au-Prince killed Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, and within hours American sailors and Marines were landing in the capital. But the warships were already waiting offshore, the treaty terms had already been drafted and refused, and Haiti's gold reserves had already been shipped to New York.

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On July 27, 1890, Vincent van Gogh walked into the countryside outside Auvers-sur-Oise and returned after dark with a bullet wound in his chest. He was thirty-seven, had been painting for barely a decade, and had sold almost nothing. In his final seventy days he produced more than seventy paintings while his brother Theo, his sole support, faced troubles of his own.

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On July 26, 1533, Spanish conquistadors executed Atahualpa, the captive ruler of the Inca empire, in the square at Cajamarca. Months earlier, fewer than two hundred Spaniards had ambushed him and seized the god-king through whom the whole empire of Tawantinsuyu ran. He tried to buy his life with one of the largest ransoms ever recorded, a room filled with gold and two more with silver.

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On July 25, 306 AD, Roman troops in the fortress at York hailed Constantine as emperor, hours after his father Constantius died there. Constantine held no imperial office. Diocletian had built the Tetrarchy precisely to stop soldiers from making emperors, and to keep sons from inheriting power. Now the senior Augustus, Galerius, had to choose between civil war and legitimizing a usurper. The choice he made set Constantine on the road to Christianity, Constantinople, and sole rule of Rome.

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On July 24, 1943, RAF Bomber Command launched Operation Gomorrah against Hamburg, opening raids that would kill roughly 37,000 people. That first night, British crews pushed bundles of foil strips into the sky and erased the German radar network that had been shooting them down for a year. Four nights later, heat, weather, and dense apartment blocks combined into something nobody had planned for and nobody could reproduce.

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On July 23, 1885, Ulysses S. Grant died at a mountain cottage in New York, shortly after finishing the memoirs he wrote to keep his family out of poverty. He had won the Civil War and served two terms as president. Then a fraudulent brokerage firm took his fortune and throat cancer took his voice. Working in pencil against the clock, the general who once demanded unconditional surrender produced one of the finest books ever written by a soldier.

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On July 22, 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee after a man he had handcuffed escaped his apartment and flagged down two patrol officers. Tracy Edwards led police back to Apartment 213, where a knife under the bed and a drawer of photographs finally ended years of killing. But the harder story is what came before: a fourteen-year-old boy returned to Dahmer's door by police months earlier, and a neighbor who called again and again. A case about who gets believed, and who does not.

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