What exactly happened at Little Bighorn will never be known. Confident that he had found Sitting Bull’s camp, General Custer divided his troops into three, hoping to cut his opponents off. But the initial assault went wrong and after less than an hour, Custer found himself trapped on the hill above the river, at the mercy of a vast force of war-whooping Sioux fighters.

Because there were few survivors, we do not even know exactly how he died. Some say he was cut down by an enemy bullet; others that he was wounded and then shot by his brother to spare him from agonising torture. Either way, the battle brought the end of Custer’s life – and the beginning of his legend.

26 June

AD 363: A Persian spear fells Roman Emperor Julian

On 26 June, Julian had thrown himself into a fray after marching on the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, a historian on the emperor’s military staff, “when suddenly a cavalry spear, grazing the skin of his arm, pierced his side and fixed itself in the bottom of his liver”.

27 June

1954: Brazil and Hungary’s World Cup quarter-final descends into an all-out brawl

“Never in my life have I seen such cruel tackling, the cutting down of opponents as if with a scythe, followed by threatening attitudes and sly jabs when officialdom was engaged elsewhere,” reported The Times correspondent.

At the final whistle, the Brazilians once again invaded the pitch, and the fighting in the dressing room was so intense that Hungary’s manager needed four stitches in his face. For the referee, Arthur Ellis from Halifax, the events that day were a terrible disappointment: “I thought it was going to be the greatest game I’d ever see. I was on top of the world,” he said later. “Whether politics and religion had something to do with it I don’t know, but they behaved like animals.”

28 June

1846: The saxophone is invented

Having devised instruments such as the saxhorn and the saxotromba, Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax hits the jackpot with his patent for a single-reed instrument made of brass. Once again he names it after himself – the saxophone.

29 June

1613: The Globe theatre burns to the ground

The production company clearly wanted the play All Is True – which centres on Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon – to go off with a bang. And so, at a climactic moment in the performance, a cannon was fired towards the theatre’s famous open roof.

The explosion certainly made an impact, but for all the wrong reasons. Sparks set the thick thatched roof smouldering and, before long, smoke was creeping through the rafters. At first, nobody in the crowd seemed to notice – according to one onlooker, “their eyes [were] more attentive to the show” – but soon the fire had become impossible to ignore.

Remarkably, nobody was hurt in the blaze, though one man’s breeches caught alight (his skin was literally saved when someone soaked him in beer).

The Globe itself wasn’t so lucky and the inferno quickly swept through the building. The theatre that had been built by Shakespeare’s playing company in 1599, and had puton some of his most famous plays, was burned to cinders.

30 June

1934: Hitler tightens his grip on power through a spate of ruthless killings

In a brutal purge known as the Night of the Long Knives, dozens, possibly hundreds of people were killed. The victims included not just the SA leadership, but old Nazi comrades who had fallen out with Hitler, senior figures in the Catholic Centre Party and, most famously, Hitler’s predecessor as Germany’s chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher. Röhm himself was shot after refusing to commit suicide. Now Hitler’s power was unchecked. For as he boasted to the Reichstag, the Night of the Long Knives had confirmed his status as “the supreme judge of the German people”.