TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: SEPTEMBER 14
1321 Dante Alighieri dies of malaria just hours after finishing writing Paradiso.
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.
1847 U.S. forces under Gen. Winfield Scott capture Mexico City, virtually bringing the two-year Mexican War to a close.
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.
1956 IBM introduces the RAMAC 305, 1st commercial computer with a hard drive that uses magnetic disk storage, weighs over a ton
1959 The Soviet space probe Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach the Moon when it crashed onto the lunar surface.
1960 Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi-Arabia and Venezuela form the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
1964 Walt Disney awarded the Medal of Freedom at the White House
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.
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 Acting commissioner Bud Selig announced the cancellation of the 1994 baseball season on the 34th day of a strike by players.
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.
2020 Astronomers report possible sign of life on Venus, after detecting phosphine in planets’s atmosphere by telescope
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
