551 B.C. (traditional date): Birth of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (d. 479 B.C.), whose teachings on virtue, family loyalty, ritual and good government shaped Chinese civilization for more than two thousand years. Taiwan still celebrates his traditional birthday as Teachers’ Day.
480 B.C.: At the Battle of Salamis, a Greek fleet of roughly 370 triremes destroys the hitherto unstoppable navy of the Persian king Xerxes in the narrow strait between Salamis Island and the Attic coast, just west of Athens. Herodotus credits the Persians with 1,207 triremes at the start of the campaign; storms and earlier fighting had whittled that number down, but the Greeks were still badly outnumbered. Despite Persia’s earlier successes, including its victory at Thermopylae only weeks before (and the sack of Athens that followed), Xerxes’ force was stretched to its limit and needed to consolidate its land and sea forces before winter ended the campaigning season.
The Athenian commander Themistocles saw an opportunity to lure the Persians into the tight waters near Salamis, where their numbers became a liability and their ships could be destroyed on nearly equal terms. The lopsided victory undid Persia’s gains ashore, sent Xerxes himself back to Anatolia, and set up the decisive Greek land victory at Plataea the following year. Of note, Xerxes’ advisors, confident in their overwhelming numbers, had him set up a throne on Mount Aigaleos overlooking the strait so he could personally watch the victory. I can’t confirm the status of those advisors in the immediate aftermath, but I’d bet it was not a happy time.
420 A.D. : Death of Saint Jerome (b. c. 347 A.D.), an early Christian scholar and one of the Doctors of the Church, best known for translating the Hebrew and Greek biblical texts into a standardized Latin version known as the Vulgate, which remained the official Bible of the Western Church for over a thousand years. He also wrote a huge number of incisive commentaries on the books and letters contained therein. He is recognized as a saint by the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran traditions, and is the patron saint of translators; Sept. 30 is now International Translation Day.
935 A.D. : Death of Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia (b. c. 907 A.D.), murdered on his way to Mass by his brother Boleslaus (later known as “the Cruel”). Raised a Christian by his grandmother, Saint Ludmila, Wenceslaus resisted the pagan faction at court and strengthened the Church in Bohemia. He founded the rotunda at Prague Castle that later became St. Vitus Cathedral, where his remains were interred and, after his canonization, venerated as holy relics. Although he ruled as a duke, Holy Roman Emperor Otto I posthumously granted him the title of king, which is why English speakers know him from the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas.” He is the patron saint of the Czech people, and Sept. 28 is a national holiday, Czech Statehood Day.
1529 : The Ottoman army, led by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, opens the Siege of Vienna with the objective of pulling the Habsburg capital and its lands into the Ottoman Empire. Bad weather, stretched supply lines and a determined defense forced the Turks to withdraw in mid-October, but the Ottomans remained a serious threat to the Habsburgs’ hold on the eastern approaches of the Holy Roman Empire for another century and a half. The Turks were finally and conclusively thrown back at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, after which they steadily lost ground in Hungary and the Balkans; as you can correctly deduce, it was a long and bitter struggle. When you hear people talk about the rising Muslim tide reaching the Gates of Vienna, this is what they’re talking about. It was literal, and the fate of Western Europe hung in the balance.
1553 : Mary I, the daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, is crowned Queen of England at Westminster Abbey. Her half-brother Edward VI had died in July, and Mary first had to put down an attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. Despite her father’s serial marriages and break with Rome, she remained a lifelong Catholic, and she soon restored Catholicism across the country. Beginning in 1555, her government burned some 280 Protestants for heresy, including Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. The executions earned her the lasting nickname “Bloody Mary,” a reputation made worse by comparison with the glories of her half-sister Elizabeth I, who succeeded her in 1558. Despite her dark reputation, she was the first woman to be crowned and rule England in her own right, ironically paving the way for Elizabeth’s reign.
1555 : The Peace of Augsburg, concluded at the Imperial Diet by King Ferdinand on behalf of his brother, Emperor Charles V, formalizes for the first time the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (literally, “whose realm, his religion”). This principle, and the treaty that expressed it, provided intellectual underpinnings for what would eventually become freedom of religious conscience in Western thought. It recognized, at least within the Holy Roman Empire, that many of the princes of the realm sincerely held the new Lutheran theology, and that while their political differences with the Emperor would remain, the spiritual upheaval of the Protestant Reformation demanded some kind of accommodation for the sake of peace. The treaty allowed two Christian confessions (Lutheran and Roman Catholic) to exist within the Empire, with each territory following the religion of its prince. Subjects who disagreed were permitted to emigrate to a principality that suited their own beliefs. Of note, none of the other Reformed churches of the day (Calvinists and Anabaptists, among others) were included; Calvinists would not gain legal recognition until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
1770: Death of the evangelist George Whitefield (b. 1714), who with John and Charles Wesley was one of the founders of the Methodist movement. His open-air sermons in the fields of England sparked a significant spiritual revival there. He first came to the New World in 1738 and continued his custom of preaching the Gospel to huge outdoor crowds. In 1739 and 1740 he made a preaching tour that ran from Georgia to New England, drawing crowds that sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands. His work during this period, and the explosive growth of churches throughout the colonies, became the high-water mark of what is now known as the Great Awakening. Whitefield’s voice, his crossed eyes, his charisma and his message made him one of the most recognized and celebrated men in the English colonies; even the worldly Benjamin Franklin, who printed his sermons, considered him a lifelong friend. He died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and is buried beneath the pulpit of that town’s Old South Presbyterian Church.
1774: Birth of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed (d. 1845), the American nurseryman and Swedenborgian missionary who spread both the Gospel and apple trees across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and the rest of the Old Northwest during the early years of the United States. Rather than scattering seeds at random, as legend has it, he planted nurseries ahead of the line of settlement and sold the young trees to arriving pioneers.
1789: Samuel Osgood becomes the first Postmaster General of the United States under the Constitution. The same day, the Senate confirms Thomas Jefferson as the first Secretary of State, John Jay as the first Chief Justice, and Edmund Randolph as the first Attorney General. The Constitution had taken effect in March 1789, but the new Congress first had to create these offices by law (the Judiciary Act, for example, was signed only two days earlier) before George Washington’s nominees could be confirmed–it took the better part of a year to staff the new government.
1846: After three days of hard street fighting, the U.S. Army under General Zachary “Old Rough and Ready” Taylor captured Monterrey, Mexico, in the first large-scale urban battle of the Mexican War. Taylor’s generous armistice terms annoyed President Polk, but his battlefield reputation, cemented at Buena Vista the following year, made him a national hero
1881: Birth of Ludwig von Mises (d. 1973), the Austrian economist who was particularly outspoken about the deadly effects of socialist economic models on both the economies and the political lives of nations. His 1920 argument that central planners cannot rationally calculate prices without markets became a cornerstone of the case against socialism. Building on the work of Carl Menger, who founded the Austrian School of economics, Mises became its leading 20th-century figure, characterized by a deep understanding and broad-based endorsement of capitalism and free markets in the affairs of men and nations. He emigrated to the United States in 1940 and taught for many years at New York University; his student Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974.
1882: The Vulcan Street Plant on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, begins operating as the world’s first hydroelectric central power station. It was built by local paper manufacturer H. J. Rogers using Thomas Edison’s newly patented electrical system, part of the rapid rollout of Edison’s market infrastructure that also produced his Pearl Street Station in New York earlier that month.
1890: Congress establishes Sequoia National Park in California, the second national park in the United States after Yellowstone, to protect groves of giant sequoias, including the tree now known as the General Sherman, the largest living tree on Earth by volume.
1890: Spurred on by naturalist John Muir and editor Robert Underwood Johnson, and building on the Yosemite Grant that President Lincoln signed in 1864, Congress establishes Yosemite National Park in the central Sierra Nevada, a spectacular wilderness of granite cliffs, waterfalls and glacier-carved valleys that defines the National Park system to this day. The 1890 park surrounded Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove; the valley itself remained under California’s control until 1906, when the state returned it to the federal government.
1894: Birth of Lothar von Richthofen (d. 1922), younger brother of the “Red Baron” Manfred and a fighter ace in his own right with 40 confirmed victories. He survived the war only to die in a civil air crash in 1922.
1895: Death of Louis Pasteur (b. 1822), one of the great minds of microbiology, who helped develop and then proved the germ theory of disease. His name is forever attached to pasteurization, the heating process that removes the traditional threat of illness from milk and wine. He also developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies; his first successful use of the rabies vaccine, on a young boy in 1885, made him a hero across France.
1897: Birth of William Faulkner (d. 1962), the Mississippi novelist best known for The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!, set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, for A Fable and The Reivers.
1898: Birth of George Gershwin (d. 1937), born Jacob Gershwine to a family whose name had originally been Gershowitz. Composer of Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris and Porgy and Bess, he did as much as anyone to bring jazz into the concert hall.
1901: Birth of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (d. 1954), widely regarded as one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century and one of the rare physicists equally gifted in theory and experiment. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 and used the trip to Stockholm to escape Fascist Italy with his Jewish wife. In December 1942, his blend of theoretical physics and practical engineering produced the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction, Chicago Pile-1, beneath the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field, an early proof of concept for the Manhattan Project. He also published incisive papers on quantum theory, particle physics and statistical mechanics. Fermi’s was the mind that made those concepts accessible to the wider scientific community. Element 100, fermium, is named in his honor.
1903: Derailment of the Southern Railway’s “Old 97” at the Stillhouse Trestle near Danville, Virginia. If you know the folk song, you’ll know the engineer was trying to make up lost time to get the mail in on schedule down in Spencer, North Carolina. They didn’t make it. The speeding train jumped the track on the curve leading onto the trestle and plunged into the ravine below, killing 11 of the 18 people on board, including the engineer, Joseph “Steve” Broady. The locomotive was rebuilt after the wreck and returned to service.
1907: Birth of Gene Autry (d. 1998), the most popular and widely recorded star of the “singing cowboy” era of popular music and movies in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. He is the only entertainer with stars in all five categories on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, recorded the hit version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and later founded the Los Angeles (now California) Angels baseball team.
1908: Ford Motor Company introduces the Model T, priced at $850 for the touring car, when most automobiles of the day cost well over $2,000. Henry Ford was determined to build a machine that virtually anyone could afford, including his factory workers; with the moving assembly line introduced in 1913, the price eventually fell below $300. Between 1908 and the end of the run in 1927, Ford built more than 15 million of them, a record that stood until 1972, when it was surpassed by the air-cooled Volkswagen Beetle. (The original Beetle stayed in production in Mexico until 2003.)
1918: Opening guns of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, part of the final Allied push against the Hindenburg Line and the largest American battle of the Great War, involving more than a million U.S. troops under General John J. Pershing. Between this day and the Armistice on November 11, the continuous 47-day battle cost the American Expeditionary Forces about 120,000 casualties, including some 26,000 killed, the highest butcher’s bill of any battle in American history. It also produced two of the war’s most famous episodes: the “Lost Battalion” and Sergeant Alvin York’s capture of 132 German soldiers.
1922: Birth of Prince Nicholas Romanovich Romanov (d. 2014), a great-great-grandson of Czar Nicholas I and, for many monarchists, the head of the Romanov family and pretender to the throne of Russia (a claim disputed by the rival line of Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna). FYI: when the remains of Czar Nicholas II and his family, recovered from the woods near Yekaterinburg, were reburied at the 1998 state funeral in Saint Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Cathedral, Prince Nicholas attended as head of the Romanov Family Association. After his death, his brother Dimitri Romanovich (1926–2016) held the title until his own death, after which Prince Andrew Andreevich Romanov (1923–2021) assumed the role of head of the family and nominal heir to the imperial throne.
1927: Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees smacks his 60th home run of the season, a record that stood until 1961, when another Yankee, Roger Maris, hit 61. In 2022 yet another Yankee, Aaron Judge, hit 62 to set the current American League record. (The major league record is 73, set by Barry Bonds in 2001.)
1928: Birth of Elie Wiesel (d. 2016), Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1986). Deported as a teenager to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald, he lost his mother, father and younger sister to the Nazis. His memoir Night became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust, and he spent the rest of his life as a relentless witness against genocide and indifference. He was the founding chairman of the commission that created the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
1928: The Soviet Union launches its first Five-Year Plan, setting production quotas, prices, distribution plans and work assignments for the entire country. The plan’s forced industrialization went hand in hand with the collectivization of agriculture, which helped bring on the famines of the early 1930s, including the Holodomor in Ukraine. Twelve completed plans later (the thirteenth was cut short), the system collapsed along with the USSR in 1991 into a simulacrum of a market-based system, deeply corrupted by the lingering fruits of communist cronyism.
1929: Army Lieutenant (and air racer) Jimmy Doolittle becomes the first pilot to take off, fly a set course and land with no outside view at all, flying from a hooded cockpit at Mitchel Field, New York, while a safety pilot rode along in the other seat. He relied on an artificial horizon, a directional gyro and a sensitive altimeter that he helped develop and test with the Guggenheim Fund’s Full Flight Laboratory. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the development of dependable instrument flying, pioneered by Doolittle, remains the single most important development in aviation since 1903. Doolittle went on to lead the 1942 Tokyo Raid and earn the Medal of Honor.
1934 : Birth of Brigitte Bardot (d. 2025), the French actress and international sex symbol of the 1950s and 60s, best known for And God Created Woman (1956). She retired from film in 1973 and devoted the rest of her life to animal-rights activism through her own foundation.
1938: Less than three weeks after Adolf Hitler’s incendiary speech at Nuremberg demanding “self-determination” for the Germans living in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, the leaders of Britain, France and Italy agree to let Germany annex the region. The Munich Agreement, signed by Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Benito Mussolini and Hitler in the early hours of Sept. 30, is the textbook example of appeasement as a means to prevent war. Chamberlain, its most vocal advocate, returned to London promising “peace for our time,” brushing aside Winston Churchill, then a Conservative backbencher, who had been warning ever more stridently of Germany’s aggressive intentions and Britain’s woeful unpreparedness to resist them. You’ll note that the conference included no Czechoslovak representatives and no one from the Soviet Union. Given that France and the USSR both had mutual-assistance treaties with Czechoslovakia, the Czechs still call the settlement the Munich Betrayal, or the Munich Diktat. Hitler occupied the rest of the country the following March.
1938: The League of Nations Assembly, perhaps sensing the true import of the Munich Pact, unanimously passes a resolution declaring the intentional bombing of civilian populations illegal. The resolution had no enforcement mechanism, and within a year the Luftwaffe was bombing Warsaw.
1939: Four weeks after Germany’s invasion of Poland, and eleven days after the Soviet Union invaded from the east, the Nazi and Soviet governments sign the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, formally dividing the country between themselves. Its secret protocols also moved Lithuania into the Soviet sphere.
1941: On what was called “Liberty Fleet Day,” the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard in Baltimore launches the SS Patrick Henry, the first of about 2,710 Liberty ships built in U.S. yards between 1941 and 1945. Built to a simple standardized design, the ships came to be assembled in as little as a few weeks and carried the bulk of Allied war cargo. Only two remain operational: the SS John W. Brown, on display in Baltimore, and the SS Jeremiah O’Brien at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, which makes periodic cruises around San Francisco Bay.
1941: In German-occupied Kiev, Ukraine, SS and police units of Einsatzgruppe C, aided by local collaborators, massacre the city’s Jewish population in a ravine called Babi Yar just outside the city, murdering 33,771 men, women and children in two days, one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. Over the rest of the occupation, tens of thousands more, including Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and Ukrainian nationalists, were killed at the same site.
1944: The final day of Operation Market Garden, a massive and bold Allied attempt to seize the Dutch bridges over the Maas (Meuse), the Waal and the Lower Rhine, above all the road bridge at Arnhem, and open a route into Germany’s industrial heartland. Between the complexity of the combined airborne and ground assault, a single exposed road for the relieving armor, the lack of supporting fires, and the unexpected presence of two SS panzer divisions near Arnhem, the operation collapsed. That night, the survivors of the British 1st Airborne Division were evacuated across the Rhine; fewer than a quarter of the roughly 10,000 men who landed made it back. The battle became widely remembered when Cornelius Ryan published A Bridge Too Far in 1974, followed by the epic film of the same name in 1977.
1947: First television broadcast of the World Series, the contest that year being between the New York Yankees (there they are again!) and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Yankees won in seven games; the series also featured Jackie Robinson in his rookie season.
1949: Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) proclaims the establishment of the People’s Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. Within a decade, land reform campaigns, political purges and the famine of the Great Leap Forward had cost tens of millions of lives. Those of us of a certain age will remember the startling images from the later Cultural Revolution (1966–76) of thousands of Red Guards chanting slogans and waving the Little Red Book, filled with the sayings and non-negotiable demands of the new communist model of governance.
1957: Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division escort nine Black students, the “Little Rock Nine,” into Little Rock’s Central High School, enforcing the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling after Governor Orval Faubus and a hostile mob had kept them out. President Eisenhower had ordered about 1,200 paratroopers to the city and federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard, some 10,000 men, taking it out of the governor’s hands. Troops remained at the school for the rest of the school year.
1960: First broadcast of The Flintstones, the first animated series to hold a prime-time slot on network television. ABC ran the show for 166 episodes over six seasons.
1966: The British protectorate of Bechuanaland gains its independence and becomes the Republic of Botswana, with Sir Seretse Khama as its first president. Then one of the poorest countries in the world, it became one of Africa’s most stable democracies, with an economy built on diamonds. It’s a shame about the name change, though, as Bechuanaland is one of those historic place names, like Zanzibar and Tanganyika, that just feel good to pronounce out loud.
1968: The “American tribal love-rock musical” Hair opens at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre, one day after the Lord Chamberlain’s theatre censorship was abolished, and runs for 1,997 performances, until the theatre’s roof partially collapsed in 1973.
1968: At its plant in Everett, Washington, the Boeing Company rolls out the astonishing 747, the first wide-body airliner, which first flew the following February. Boeing built 1,574 of them in a variety of passenger and freighter variants before production ended in late 2022; the last one was delivered to Atlas Air in January 2023. Several hundred remain in service worldwide, mostly as freighters, along with a handful in government service, including Air Force One. This is probably the place to add that the 747’s wingspan (about 196 feet on the original model, and over 224 feet on the final 747-8) is longer than the Wright Brothers’ entire first flight (120 feet) in 1903.
1979: As the first step in carrying out the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, the Panama Canal Zone formally ceases to exist and the United States gives up sovereignty over the territory, keeping only the right to operate and defend the canal. Control passed gradually to Panama, which took full ownership of the canal at noon on December 31, 1999.
About the Author
Maybe she had postpartum that day.
In the end, Lacy, the architect does what the customer wants, not vice versa. If the customer wanted or could…
She apparently is not into symmetry!
The 'usual suspects' are at it again... https://shoredailynews.com/headlines/exmore-man-charged-with-felony-homicide-following-fatal-shooting-in-northampton-county/
It's canny how they made it look like an old train station!