The Fourth of July is pretty much the American holiday, and rather a lot of American history is tied to it. (Who would have thought that both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would cash in their chips on the same day, exactly 50 years after 1776?) However, the date has had its share of non-American events as well:
362 BC: Battle of Mantinea, Thebes vs. Sparta. Officially, Thebes won; however, they lost their leader Epaminondas, and with both sides hurting, the Macedonians, led by Phillip II, wound up conquering the place.
414: Pulcheria, teenage daughter of Arcadius, emperor of the eastern Roman Empire until his death in 408, declared herself regent over younger brother Theodosius II, heir to the throne, and ruled as de facto Empress thereafter, kid brother being sort of a wuss.
1054: Chinese astronomers observe a supernova; the remnants thereof are now known as the Crab Nebula.
1456: Sultan Mehmed II lays siege to Nándorfehérvár in the Hungarian Empire. John Hunyadi successfully repelled the Ottomans, culminating with a fierce counterattack in when Mehmed was wounded. (The site is now the Serbian city of Belgrade.)
1569: Establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1791 the Commonwealth adopted a Constitution, the first in Europe and the second anywhere, following the United States in 1789. The Constitution did not, however, prevent Poland from being partitioned out of existence in 1795.
1918: Sultan Mehmed VI ascends to office by being girded with the Sword of Osman; the Ottoman Empire would be dissolved under the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, and the sultanate subsequently abolished.