July 26 in History

The Second Continental Congress established a national postal service and appointed Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General, creating the communication backbone the Revolution desperately needed. Franklin's postal routes connected the thirteen colonies into a functioning information network that carried military dispatches, newspapers, and political correspondence. The system he built evolved into the United States Postal Service, the nation's oldest continuously operating federal institution.

Ninety thousand Muslims faced each other across the Euphrates near Siffin, cousin against cousin. Ali ibn Abu Talib, the Prophet's son-in-law and fourth caliph, commanded one army. Muawiyah, governor of Syria, led the other. They fought for three months—July to September 657—over who rightfully ruled Islam's empire. When Muawiyah's forces raised Qurans on their spears to demand arbitration, the killing stopped. But the arbitration failed. The civil war that began here would split Islam into Sunni and Shia, a division that outlasted both men by fourteen centuries.

A medieval banquet hall at Henry VI's Hoftag suddenly collapsed on July 26, 1184, sending dozens of gathered nobles plunging into open sewage pits below. The tragedy eliminated key regional leaders and forced a temporary halt to imperial governance in the area.

Atahualpa filled a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide with gold—once to the height of his raised hand—as ransom. Nine tons total. Francisco Pizarro took it anyway and strangled him with an iron collar on July 26, 1533. The emperor had ruled just five years, surviving a civil war against his half-brother only to meet 168 Spaniards in Cajamarca. His execution dissolved the largest empire in pre-Columbian America within months. Turns out you can buy a room full of gold but not a promise from men who'd crossed an ocean for exactly that.

Francis Drake lands at a "fair and good" bay along the Pacific Northwest coast, likely in present-day Oregon or Washington. This landing establishes England's first tangible claim to the region, challenging Spanish dominance over the western seaboard and opening the door for future British exploration and settlement in North America.

The Dutch provinces fired their king by mail. On July 26, 1581, they sent Philip II a formal letter explaining he was no longer their monarch—not a rebellion, they insisted, but a legal termination of contract. The document cited twenty-nine specific grievances. It worked: seven provinces became the Dutch Republic, surviving eighty years of war to win recognition. And it gave Thomas Jefferson a template—the Plakkaat's structure of listing royal abuses before declaring independence appeared word-for-word in another famous breakup letter 195 years later.

Tyrolean peasants stormed the Pontlatzer Bridge to eject Maximilian II Emanuel, shattering his plan to march on Vienna alongside French forces. This rural victory forced the Bavarian army to retreat, directly saving the Habsburg capital from capture during the War of the Spanish Succession.

The fortress cost France 30 years and 30 million livres to build—supposedly more expensive than Versailles. Gone in 49 days. British commander Jeffery Amherst accepted the surrender of Louisbourg on July 26, 1758, after his cannons fired 1,473 shells into the stone walls. 5,637 French soldiers and sailors became prisoners. The British now controlled the gateway to the St. Lawrence River and Quebec itself. France had built the most expensive fortress in North America to guard a colony it would lose within five years.

Horse-drawn wagons rolled along metal rails from Wandsworth to Croydon—nine miles through south London's industrial sprawl. The Surrey Iron Railway charged anyone willing to pay: farmers hauling lime, merchants moving coal, manufacturers transporting goods. No steam engines. No passengers. Just L-shaped flanged rails that let horses pull four times their normal load. Parliament had authorized it in 1801 as a toll road on iron, open to all comers with proper wheels. Within thirty years, steam locomotives made it obsolete. The world's first public railway was designed for a technology that never arrived.