TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: SEPT 14
1321 Dante Alighieri dies of malaria just hours after finishing writing Paradiso.
1716 1st lighthouse in US lit (Boston Harbor)
1752 England & colonies adopt Gregorian calendar, 11 days disappear
1791 Louis XVI swears his allegiance to the French constitution.
1807 Former U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr was acquitted of a misdemeanor charge. Two weeks earlier Burr had been found innocent of treason.
1812 Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia reaches its climax as his Grande Armee enters Moscow–only to find the enemy capital deserted and burning, set afire by the few Russians who remained.
1814 Francis Scott Key wrote the “Star-Spangled Banner,” a poem originally known as “Defense of Fort McHenry,” after witnessing the British bombardment of Fort McHenry, MD, during the War of 1812. The song became the official U.S. national anthem on March 3, 1931.
1901 Vice President Theodore Roosevelt is sworn in as the 26th President of the United States upon the death of William McKinley, who was shot eight days earlier.
1936 1st prefrontal lobotomy in America performed by Walter Freeman and James W. Watts at George Washington University Hospital in Washington D.C.
1940 Congress passed the Selective Service Act, providing for the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.
1949 India’s Constituent Assembly adopts Hindi as an official language. Celebrated today as Hindi Day.
1956 IBM introduces the RAMAC 305, 1st commercial computer with a hard drive that uses magnetic disk storage, weighs over a ton
1959 First Man-Made Object Successfully Lands on the Moon
1960 Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia form OPEC.
1966 Operation Attleboro, designed as a training exercise for American troops, becomes a month-long struggle against the Viet Cong.
1974 Charles Kowal discovers Leda, 13th satellite of Jupiter
1975 Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton becomes the first native-born American saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
1979 Nur Muhammad Taraki, president and former prime minister of Afghanistan, is assassinated in a coup in which prime minister Hafizullah Amin seizes power.
1982 Bachir Gemayel, president-elect of Lebanon, is killed along with 26 others in a bomb blast in Beirut.
1985 The Golden Girls Make Their Television Debut
1989 Joseph T. Wesbecker shot and killed eight people and wounded twelve others at a printing plant in Louisville, KY. Wesbecker, 47 years old, was on disability for mental illness. He took his own life after the incident.
1994 Major League Baseball players strike over a salary cap and other proposed changes, forcing the cancellation of the entire postseason and the World Series.
2001 Nintendo released the GameCube home video game console in Japan.
2001 The FBI released the names of the 19 suspected hijackers that had taken part in the September 11 terror attacks on the U.S.
2015 In Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors detected gravitational waves for the first time. The news was reported on February 11, 2016.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
