August 7 is the 219th day of the year (220th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 146 days remain until the end of the year.
461 – Roman Emperor Majorian is beheaded near the river Iria in north-west Italy following his arrest and deposition by the magister militum Ricimer.
626 – The Avar and Slav armies leave the siege of Constantinople.
768 – Pope Stephen III is elected to office, and quickly seeks Frankish protection against the Lombard threat, since the Byzantine Empire is no longer able to help.
936 – Coronation of King Otto I of Germany.
1461 – The Ming dynasty Chinese military general Cao Qin stages a coup against the Tianshun Emperor.
1479 – Battle of Guinegate: French troops of King Louis XI were defeated by the Burgundians led by Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg.
1679 – The brigantine Le Griffon becomes the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes of North America.
1714 – The Battle of Gangut: The first important victory of the Russian Navy.
1743 – The Treaty of Åbo ended the 1741– 1743 Russo-Swedish War.
1782 – George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.
1786 – The first federal Indian Reservation is created by the United States.
1789 – The United States Department of War is established.
1791 – American troops destroy the Miami town of Kenapacomaqua near the site of presentday Logansport, Indiana in the Northwest Indian War.
1794 – U.S. President George Washington invokes the Militia Acts of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion.
1819 – Simón Bolívar triumphs over Spain in the Battle of Boyacá.
1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York to San Francisco 1927 – The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.
1933 – The Kingdom of Iraq slaughters over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Simele. This date is recognized as Martyrs Day by the Assyrian community.
1942 – World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal begins as the United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
1944 – IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).
1946 – The government of the Soviet Union presented a note to its Turkish counterparts which refuted the latter's sovereignty over the Turkish Straits, thus beginning the Turkish Straits crisis.
1947 – Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 4,300 mile journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that prehistoric peoples could have traveled from South America.
1947 – The Bombay Municipal Corporation formally takes over the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport (BEST).
1959 – Explorer 6 launches from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1960 – Ivory Coast becomes independent from France.
1962 – Canadian-born American pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey is awarded the U.S. President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for her refusal to authorize thalidomide.
1964 – Vietnam War: The U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.
1969 – Richard Nixon appoints Luis R. Bruce, a Mohawk-Oglala Sioux as the new commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
1970 – California judge Harold Haley is taken hostage in his courtroom and killed during an effort to free George Jackson from police custody.