TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: SEPT 6
3114 BC Date Maya/Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar starts dating from (as corresponds to the Julian Calendar).
1522 One of the five ships that set out in Ferdinand Magellan’s trip around the world makes it back to Spain. Only 15 of the original 265 men that set out survived. Magellan was killed by natives in the Philippines.
1620 The Mayflower departs Plymouth, England with 102 Pilgrims and about 30 crew for the New World
1839 Great fire in NY
1847 Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves back into town, to Concord, Massachusetts.
1869 Mine fire kills 179 at Avondale Pennsylvania
1870 The last British troops to serve in Austria are withdrawn
1870 A Woman casts her Vote in the US for the first time. Louisa Ann Swain voted during state elections in the state of Wyoming.
1899 Carnation processed its first can of evaporated milk
1901 President William McKinley is shot while attending a reception at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, by 28-year-old anarchist Leon Czolgosz. McKinley dies eight days later, the third American president assassinated.
1909 New York Times headline announces American explorer Robert Peary had discovered the North Pole 5 months earlier
1916 1st true supermarket, the “Piggly Wiggly” is opened by Clarence Saunders in Memphis, Tennessee
1941 Germany announces that all Jews living in the country will have to begin wearing a Star of David.
1953 The last American and Korean prisoners are exchanged in Operation Big Switch, the last official act of the Korean War.
1972 The world learns an earlier announcement that all Israeli athletes taken hostage at the Munich Olympics had been rescued was erroneous; all had been killed by their captors from the Black September terrorist group; all but 3 terrorists also died in shootout around midnight.
1975 Martina Navratilova requested political asylum while in New York for the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament.
1976 Lieutenant Viktor Belenko, a Soviet air force pilot defects, flying a MiG-25 jet fighter to Japan and requesting political asylum in US.
1988 Lee Roy Young becomes the first African-American Texas Ranger in the force’s 165-year history.
1991 The name St. Petersburg was restored to Russia’s second largest city. The city was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great. The name has been changed to Petrograd (1914) and to Leningrad (1924).
1995 U.S. Senator Bob Packwood was expelled by the Senate Ethics Committee.
1997 More than 2 billion people watched Princess Diana’s funeral on TV.
1999 Suai Church Massacre. More than 200 people who had found refuge in a church in Suai, East Timor were killed by pro-Indonesia militia after the results of an independence referendum came out.
2002 In New York, the U.S. Congress convened at Federal Hall for a rare special session. The session was held in New York to express the nation’s mourning for the loss on September 11, 2001 and unity in the war against terrorism.
2008 The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced that Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) would be placed in government conservatorship.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
