July 28:

1914, World War I began as Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.

1945, A U.S. Army B-25 bomber crashed into the 79th floor of New York’s Empire State Building, the world’s tallest structure at the time, killing 14 people.

1976, an earthquake devastated northern China, killing at least 242,000 people, according to an official estimate.

2004, the Irish Republican Army formally announced an end to their armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.

July 29:

1858, the United States and Japan signed the Harris Treaty, formalizing diplomatic relations and trading rights between the two countries.

1921, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party.

1981, Britain’s Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in a glittering ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. (They divorced in 1996.)

2016, former suburban Chicago police officer Drew Peterson was given an additional 40 years in prison for trying to hire someone to kill the prosecutor who put him behind bars for killing his third wife.

July 30:

1619, the first representative assembly in Colonial America convened in Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which led to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.

2012, three electric grids in India collapsed in a cascade, cutting power to 620 million people in the world’s biggest blackout.

July 31:

1777, the 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette received a commission as major general in the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress.

1971, Apollo 15 crew members David Scott and James Irwin became the first astronauts to use a lunar rover on the surface of the moon.

1972, vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton withdrew from the Democratic ticket with George McGovern following disclosures that Eagleton had received electroshock therapy to treat clinical depression.

2012, at the Summer Olympics in London, swimmer Michael Phelps won his 19th Olympic medal, becoming the most decorated Olympian of all time. (He would finish his career with 28 total Olympic medals, 23 of them gold.)

Aug. 1:

1907, a week-long boys’ camping event began on Brownsea Island in southern England, organized by Robert Baden-Powell; the event is now marked as the beginning of the Scout Movement.

1966, Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, went on an armed rampage at the University of Texas in Austin that killed 14 people, most of whom were shot by Whitman while he was perched in the clock tower of the main campus building.

2014, a medical examiner ruled that a New York City police officer’s chokehold caused the death of Eric Garner, whose videotaped arrest and final pleas of “I can’t breathe!” had sparked outrage.

2023, former President Donald Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury on conspiracy and obstruction charges related to his alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Aug. 2:

1776, members of the Second Continental Congress began attaching their signatures to the Declaration of Independence.

1921, a jury in Chicago acquitted several former members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team and two others of conspiring to defraud the public in the notorious “Black Sox” scandal (though they would be banned from Major League Baseball for life by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis).

1923, the 29th president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, died in San Francisco; Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president.

1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, seizing control of the oil-rich emirate. (The Iraqis were later driven out by the U.S. in Operation Desert Storm.)

Aug. 3:

1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, on his first voyage that took him to the present-day Americas.

1936, Jesse Owens of the United States won the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics as he took the 100-meter sprint.

1981, U.S. air traffic controllers went on strike, seeking pay and workplace improvements (two days later, President Ronald Reagan fired the 11,345 striking union members and barred them from federal employment).

2018, Las Vegas police said they were closing their investigation into the Oct. 1, 2017 shooting that left 58 people dead at a country music festival without a definitive answer for why Stephen Paddock unleashed gunfire from a hotel suite onto the concert crowd.

— Associated Press