TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – SEPT 1
69 Traditional date of the destruction of Jerusalem
1676 Nathaniel Bacon leads an uprising against English Governor William Berkeley at Jamestown, Virginia, resulting in the settlement being burned to the ground. Bacon’s Rebellion came in response to the governor’s repeated refusal to defend the colonists against the Indians.
1773 Phillis Wheatley, a slave from Boston, publishes a collection of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in London.
1799 Bank of Manhattan Company opens in NYC (forerunner to Chase Manhattan)
1807 Aaron Burr is arrested in Mississippi for complicity in a plot to establish a Southern empire in Louisiana and Mexico.
1836 Protestant missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman leads a party to Oregon. His wife, Narcissa, is one of the first white women to travel the Oregon Trail. The Oregon Trail emigrants who chose to follow Stephen Meek thought his shortcut would save weeks of hard travel. Instead, it brought them even greater misery.
1882 The first Labor Day is observed in New York City by the Carpenters and Joiners Union.
1894 By an act of Congress, Labor Day is declared a national holiday.
1905 Alberta and Saskatchewan become Canadian provinces.
1914 Passenger Pigeons become extinct
1916 Keating-Owen Act (child labor banned from interstate commerce)
1923 An earthquake levels the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, killing 300,000.
1939 World War II began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
1941 Yellow star becomes obligatory for Jews in the Reich to wear
1942 A federal judge in Sacramento, Cal., upholds the government’s detention of Japanese-Americans and Japanese nationals as a war measure.
1969 Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seizes power in Libya following a coup.
1971 Danny Murtaugh (Pittsburgh Pirates) gave his lineup card to the umpire with the names of nine black baseball players on it. This was a first for Major League Baseball.
1979 US spacecraft Pioneer 11 makes the first-ever flyby of Saturn.
1983 A Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter, killing all 269 people aboard.
1985 The wreck of the Titanic found by Dr. Robert Ballard and Jean Louis Michel in a joint U.S. and French expedition.
1998 On National Day, Vietnam releases 5,000 prisoners, including political dissidents.
2004 Chechen terrorists took about 1,200 schoolchildren and others hostage in Beslan, Russia. Commandos stormed the school on Sept. 3
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
