On August 7
On August 7, the Human Saga records one pivotal event: Bolívar's victory at Boyacá liberates New Granada (1819).
On this day
On 7 August 1819 Simón Bolívar's patriot army, having crossed the flooded plains of the Orinoco and the freezing Andean pass of the Páramo de Pisba, routed a Spanish royalist force at the Boyacá bridge in present-day Colombia.
Also this week in history (Aug 4 – Aug 10)
In August 1444 a fleet of six ships organised by the Lagos tax-collector Lançarote de Freitas returned from raids on the Bay of Arguin (modern Mauritania) and landed roughly 235 captive Africans at Lagos in southern Portugal.
The United States detonated nuclear weapons over Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945) — the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict.
On 9 August 378 CE, near Adrianople in Thrace (modern Edirne, Turkey), the eastern emperor Valens led the Roman field army against Gothic forces under Fritigern, a coalition of Therving and Greuthung Goths together with Alans and others…
Signed on 10 August 843, the Treaty of Verdun ended a bitter civil war among the grandsons of Charlemagne by dividing the Carolingian Empire among the three surviving sons of Emperor Louis the Pious.
Over three days in August 955, King Otto I of East Francia (Germany) annihilated a large invading Magyar (Hungarian) army near Augsburg on the Lech river.
On 6 August 1806, Francis II abdicated the imperial crown and released all member states and officials from their obligations, formally dissolving the Holy Roman Empire after roughly a thousand years.
The South Pacific Forum, later renamed the Pacific Islands Forum, was established at an inaugural meeting held in Wellington, New Zealand, from 5 to 7 August 1971.
On 6 August 1985, eight member states of the South Pacific Forum signed the Treaty of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, creating the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone.
In 1767 Empress Catherine II of Russia issued the Nakaz, or Instruction, a guiding document for the Legislative Commission convened to draft a new law code.
The 2008 Summer Olympics opened on 8 August 2008 at Beijing's National Stadium, the 'Bird's Nest', with an elaborate ceremony directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou and watched by an estimated audience of several billion worldwide.
On 9 August 2021 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the Working Group I contribution to its Sixth Assessment Report, 'Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis'.
On 8 August 2025, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met at a White House summit mediated by President Donald Trump, where they initialed a peace agreement and signed a joint declaration aimed at…