490 BC – At the Battle of Marathon, Athenian hoplites in a refined phalanx formation halted Persian King Darius I’s invasion of Greece. Over 6,400 Persians died against roughly 192 Greek losses; Darius withdrew and made no further attempt on the region for a decade. The victory is often marked as the start of Athens’ rise in the Classical period.
122 AD – Roman Emperor Hadrian begins construction of the wall across northern Britain that bears his name.
1254 – Birth of Venetian explorer Marco Polo (d. 1324).
1715 – Death of Dom Pierre Pérignon (b. 1638), the Benedictine monk credited with developing Champagne’s sparkling-wine method.
1741 – George Frideric Handel completes his oratorio Messiah after just 24 days of composition.
1752 – Britain adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days overnight. (Older dates are sometimes marked “O.S.” for “Old Style” — Thomas Jefferson’s gravestone gives his birth date under the Julian calendar, but most biographies use the Gregorian equivalent, eleven days later.)
1776 – Spain establishes the Presidio of San Francisco to guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay.
1789 – Delegates sign the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia and send it to the states for ratification.
1812 – A week after defeating the Russian army at Borodino, Napoleon enters Moscow and occupies the Kremlin. The following day, fires break out and burn for three days, destroying roughly three-quarters of the city.
1814 – Held overnight aboard a British warship in Baltimore Harbor, lawyer Francis Scott Key watches the all-night bombardment of Fort McHenry. Seeing the American flag still flying at dawn, he writes the poem that becomes “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
1818 – Birth of Richard Gatling (d. 1903), American inventor of the Gatling gun.
1835 – HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, arrives at the Galápagos Islands.
1851 – Birth of U.S. Army physician Walter Reed (d. 1902), whose identification of mosquito-borne yellow fever enabled construction of the Panama Canal.
1862 – Union soldiers find a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s “Special Order 191” wrapped around cigars in an abandoned camp, revealing his plans for the Maryland campaign. Two days later, Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson capture Harpers Ferry, Virginia, taking over 12,000 Union prisoners — the largest surrender of American troops before Bataan in 1942. Two days after that, the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American military history, ends Lee’s invasion of the North with roughly 23,000 casualties; that same day, an accidental explosion at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Arsenal kills 78 civilian workers, mostly young women — the war’s deadliest industrial accident, overshadowed by news from Antietam.
1875 – Birth of James Cash Penney (d. 1971), founder of the J.C. Penney department store chain.
1888 – Birth of French entertainer Maurice Chevalier (d. 1972).
1891 – Birth of German submarine commander Karl Dönitz (d. 1980), architect of the U-boat “wolfpack” strategy and, briefly, Hitler’s designated successor — a role in which he ordered Germany’s surrender.
1901 – Death of President William McKinley (b. 1843), days after being shot by an assassin.
1908 – A propeller failure sends Orville Wright’s Model A into a crash during an Army demonstration at Fort Myer, Virginia. Wright is badly injured; his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, becomes aviation’s first fatality.
1914 – The First Battle of the Aisne opens, following the “Miracle on the Marne.” Two weeks of stalemate mark the collapse of Germany’s Schlieffen Plan and the start of the “Race to the Sea,” producing the trench lines that would hold for years.
1916 – British forces deploy tanks in battle for the first time, during the Battle of the Somme. Slow and unreliable, they nonetheless help infantry break through German lines in several sectors.
1917 – Russia’s provisional government formally declares the country a republic, weeks before the Bolshevik seizure of power.
1919 – Adolf Hitler, a discharged German army corporal, joins the German Workers’ Party. Later that year, Congress authorizes the American Legion as a veterans’ organization.
1929 – Birth of racing driver Sir Stirling Moss (d. 2020).
1938 – Six months after the Anschluss, Hitler delivers an inflammatory speech demanding “self-determination” for ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia responds by reinforcing its borders as tensions build toward crisis.
1940 – The height of the Battle of Britain, as Germany launches its most intensive air assault on England to date.
1944 – U.S. Marines open the costly Battle of Peleliu in the Pacific. (Your notes date this to 1945; the commonly cited year is 1944.) Also this year: birth of mountaineer Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks and to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen.
1948 – Margaret Chase Smith is elected Senator from Maine, becoming the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress. Two days later, the North American F-86 Sabre sets a world speed record of 671 mph, its swept-wing design drawing on captured German aerodynamic research.
1950 – General Douglas MacArthur launches the Inchon landing, an amphibious assault deep behind North Korean lines that collapses their position at Pusan and leads to over 135,000 prisoners taken as UN forces push toward the Yalu River.
1956 – IBM introduces the RAMAC 305, the first computer disk storage system.
1959 – Bonanza premieres, the first regularly scheduled television program broadcast in color.
1970 – Jordan’s King Hussein declares martial law after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement attempts a coup. The defeated conspirators form the militant group Black September, which two years later kills eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
A southern democrat.
Hey "Bob" I take your comment as if this was coming from an idiot. How about using your real name…
A free ride to a polling place to act like an American. Of course someone has an issue with it.
They are simply Road Pirates, nothing more, nothing less.
Unwanted gentrification without proper assimilation.