What happened on 26 July?

21 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1956 Suez Crisis Britain, France and Israel invade Egypt; US-Soviet pressure forces withdrawal. End of British imperial confidence.
2. 1953 Cuban Revolutionary War Castro's guerrillas defeat Batista's army.
3. 1945 Clement Attlee's premiership The NHS, the welfare state, nationalisation, NATO and independence for India: the most consequential peacetime ministry of the century.
4. 1533 Pizarro executes Atahualpa Spanish conquistadors strangle the captive Inca emperor at Cajamarca.
5. 1956 Nasser nationalises the Suez Canal Egypt nationalises the Suez Canal Company, triggering the Suez Crisis.
6. 2024 Paris Olympics 2024 Paris hosts the Summer Olympics — first since 1924.
7. 1953 The Moncada assault Castro leads some 130 rebels against Cuba's second-largest barracks — and the attack collapses in minutes, with the captured tortured and shot. At his trial he turns defeat into a
8. 1928 Born: Stanley Kubrick American director; 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining.
9. 1581 Dutch Declaration of Independence Act of Abjuration declares Dutch independence from Philip II.
10. 1847 First Liberian Republic founded American Colonization Society's settlers found Liberia.
11. 1822 The Guayaquil conference The two liberators meet for the only time, alone, in a room in Guayaquil — and what they said was never recorded. What happened is plain: San Martín, holding half-conquered Peru, s
12. 1469 Warwick the Kingmaker turns Sidelined by the queen's Woodville kin, the earl who put Edward IV on the throne beats the king's army at Edgecote and briefly holds Edward prisoner — then, when that fails, does t
13. 1856 Vidyasagar's Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act Vidyasagar argues from the scriptures themselves that remarriage is lawful, and gets the Company to legislate it.
14. 1980 Born: Jacinda Ardern New Zealand prime minister 2017-2023, admired worldwide for her response to the Christchurch attacks and the pandemic.
15. 1856 Born: George Bernard Shaw Irish playwright of Pygmalion and Saint Joan; Nobel laureate and gadfly.
16. 1894 Born: Aldous Huxley English novelist of Brave New World; later a chronicler of mysticism.
17. 1914 The Howth gun-running Three months after the UVF landed 25,000 rifles at Larne unhindered, the Irish Volunteers land 900 at Howth in broad daylight — and troops returning to Dublin fire on a jeering cro
18. 1758 Siege of Louisbourg (1758) Wolfe and Amherst take France's great Atlantic fortress after a seven-week siege, opening the St Lawrence to the fleet that will carry Wolfe to Quebec.
19. 2023 Niger coup 2023 Military overthrows democratically-elected government in Niger.
20. 811 Battle of Pliska Khan Krum annihilates a Byzantine army and kills Emperor Nikephoros I, whose skull he lines with silver as a drinking cup — Byzantium's worst defeat in centuries.
21. 1952 Death of Eva Perón Eva Perón dies of cancer at 33. Argentina grieves on an unprecedented scale — the radio announcement that she 'entered immortality', a queue miles long, and a cult that outlived ev