By the time the Hollywood adaptation appeared in 1962, Lee was a household name, feted as the writer who, perhaps more than any other, had persuaded white Middle America to face the harsh reality of racial prejudice.

12 July

1543: Katherine Parr became the sixth consort of Henry VIII

She married the ageing king in the queen’s closet at Hampton Court Palace with 18 people in attendance.

13 July

1793: Jean-Paul Marat, a fervent supporter of the French Revolution, is stabbed to death in his bathtub by Girondin sympathiser Charlotte Corday

The daughter of royalist parents, Corday had seen her brothers flee abroad and had reportedly been inspired by the rhetoric of the more moderate Girondin faction. She pulled from her corset a five-inch kitchen knife, and plunged it deep into Marat’s chest. “Help me, my dear!” Marat screamed at his wife. But it was already too late; as blood gushed from the wound, he was dead within moments.

14 July

1789: Mobs storm the Bastille, and the symbol of Parisian royal oppression is brought to its knees

Bernard-René de Launay was not a bad man. Born in 1740, he had spent much of his career in the French Guards, stationed in Paris, before becoming, like his father before him, the governor of the vast state prison in the centre of the capital. Contrary to what was claimed in political pamphlets of the day, the Bastille was not really such a terrible place. De Launay himself had a reputation as a reasonably considerate gaoler, and far from being stuffed with political dissidents, the Bastille was actually pretty empty. On the morning of 14 July 1789, in fact, de Launay was in charge of only seven prisoners – four forgers, two madmen and a dissolute aristocrat.

To the Paris mob, however, the Bastille was a time-honoured symbol of royal oppression. With France in the grip of a severe economic crisis, bread prices soaring, the political system deadlocked and the streets full of hysterical rumours, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the demonstrators attacked the prison. On the morning of the 14th they struck, demanding that de Launay surrender the keys and hand over all arms and artillery. At around lunchtime, they broke through into the outer courtyard. Shots were fired; the mood turned ever uglier. By 5.30 that afternoon, the fortress had fallen.

15 July

1099: Jerusalem falls to the crusaders

Launched in November 1095, the First Crusade reached its climax at the walls of Jerusalem nearly four years later. It was the height of summer, and outside the walls of the holy city, some 12,000 crusaders were preparing for the final assault. On the night of 14 July, the crusaders attacked from two siege towers. At the city’s north-eastern gate, two knights from Tournai led the charge, soon followed by scores more. And as the resistance crumbled, the blood began to flow.

16 July

1945: The US tests its atomic bomb

It was almost 5.30am on 16 July 1945, in the dawn heat of the New Mexico desert, when the bomb exploded.

“I was staring straight ahead with my open left eye covered by a welder’s glass and my right eye remaining open and uncovered,” recalled one observer, Ralph Carlisle Smith, who was watching from a nearby hilltop. “Suddenly, my right eye was blinded by a light which appeared instantaneously all about without any build up of intensity. My left eye could see the ball of fire start up like a tremendous bubble… It turned yellow, then red, and then beautiful purple.”

17 July

1955: Disneyland opens to the world

On 17 July 1955 in Anaheim, California, Walt Disney welcomed Americans into his very own Garden of Eden. “To all who come to this happy place, welcome,” he proclaimed.

18 July

1976: Olympic gymnast Nadia Comăneci makes history with her faultless routine

Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci won the first ever perfect 10 for her routine on the uneven bars. The scoreboard flashed up “1.00”, the nearest it could get to a 10. Then she did it again – and again, and again, six times in all.

19 July

1848: The world’s first women’s rights convention demands equality

The tiny village of Seneca Falls, New York has an extraordinary claim to fame. It was here that the world’s first convention on women’s rights opened on 19 July 1848 – a two-day meeting that became one of the foundational events of the international feminist movement.

Famous deaths in July

2 July 1743

Spencer Compton, Britain’s second prime minister

2 July 1961

Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning author

5 July 1913

Alfred Lyttelton, former colonial secretary

6 July 1960

Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, Welsh Labour politician and architect of the National Health Service

7 July 1661

George Fox, Quaker, writer, preacher and former Parliamentarian soldier

10 July 138

Hadrian, Roman emperor 

16 July 1960 

Albert Kesselring, German Second World War field marshal

20 July 1332

Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray

24 July 1862 

Martin van Buren, the eighth president of the United States

26 July 1680

John Wilmot, Restoration poet, courtier and rake

29 July 1890 

Vincent Van Gogh, post- impressionist painter

20 July

1923: Former Mexican revolutionary leader José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, better known as Pancho Villa, is assassinated while driving in his car through the town of Parral, Chihuahua

21 July

356 BC: The Temple of Artemis burns to the ground

For the people of Ephesus, the Temple of Artemis was a source of immense local pride. Reportedly built by the extraordinarily rich king Croesus, it was said to have been made largely of marble, boasting huge pillars. For visitors, there were few better attractions in the Greek world. Pilgrims brought jewellery as a gift for the goddess; refugees came to seek sanctuary.

• Read more | The gods and their whims: your guide to ancient Greek religion

But on 21 July 356, disaster struck. The man responsible was one Herostratus, who may have been an outsider or a slave. Supposedly hungry for fame, he decided to set the temple’s wooden rafters alight, “so that through the destruction of this most beautiful building his name might be spread through the whole world”.

The result was a tragedy. In the space of a single night, the temple was consumed by flames, and by morning it was a blackened, broken ruin.

22 July

1209: French crusaders slay thousands in the name of God

The Albigensian Crusade, which began in 1209, was one of the most blood- stained pages in medieval European history. At its heart was Pope Innocent III’s desire to stamp out the Cathar heresy – a form of Christianity condemned by the Catholic church – as well as the French king Philip II’s eagerness to crush the semi-detached County of Toulouse. But the victims, whose voices have largely been lost to history, were the people of the Languedoc, southern France, who found themselves facing a French royal army determined to take no prisoners.

23 July

1903: In Chicago, Dr Ernst Pfenning becomes the first man to buy a Ford motor car, spending less than $1,000 on a Model A.

24 July

1911: In the jungles of Peru, the American explorer and amateur archaeologist Hiram Bingham comes across the site of Machu Picchu, then virtually unknown in the outside world.

25 July

1978: World’s first IVF baby is born

Shortly before midnight on 25 July, Lesley Brown gave birth to her daughter Louise – then widely described as the world’s first ‘test tube baby’.

For the Brown family, that moment on 25 July was of course one of unutterable joy. But letters poured in from across the world, many of them downright abusive. One parcel from California contained a series of letters covered in red liquid, a broken glass test tube and a plastic foetus.

Still, there were messages of support, too. “I fear that you will find yourselves on the receiving end of all the usual criticism and condemnation that follows any medical breakthrough, so am writing to try in a tiny way to even things up,” read one letter, sent all the way from Australia.

26 July

1745: Gosden Common near Guildford hosts the first recorded women’s cricket match

Between the villages of Bramley and Hambledon, with both sides dressed in cricketing whites and sporting blue and red ribbons in their hair.

27 July

1953: The United Nations, North Korea and China signed an armistice to bring about a ceasefire in the Korean War. However, no peace treaty was ever signed.

28 July

1540: Henry VIII marries wife number five

As Thomas Cromwell was being taken to the scaffold for his execution, the Duke of Norfolk’s pretty teenage niece was dressing for the most important day of her life. Only a few days earlier, the king had secured an annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves, and his eye had already fallen on Catherine as her replacement. It was apparently love – or lust – at first sight, at least for Henry.

Did Catherine know that, even as she was repeating her marriage vows at Surrey’s Oatlands Palace, Cromwell’s freshly severed head was rotting on a spike? We will never know. What we do know, though, is that her 49-year-old husband seemed aflame with passion, since reports suggest he could barely keep his hands off her.

29 July

1981: Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer

On 29 July, more than half a million people gathered on the streets of London to cheer the couple, while an estimated 750 million people worldwide watched the service on television.

30 July

762: Abbasid Caliph Abu Jaafar Al-Mansour commissioned the construction of Baghdad as his new capital city on the Tigris.

31 July

1932: In Germany’s federal elections, Adolf Hitler‘s Nazi Party wins 38 per cent of the vote and 230 seats to become the largest party in parliament for the first time

Find out about anniversaries in previous months… 

• January
• February 
• March
• April
• May
• June

---