Pick any day on the calendar and run it back far enough and it fills up with coronations, funerals, shipwrecks and people who were very sure about something. I picked September 1.
Some of these are enormous. Some are tiny. A few are just weird. They're in chronological order, and the ones with a paragraph are the ones I couldn't let go of.
Before 1000
396 BC. The Temple of Juno Regina is dedicated on the Aventine in Rome by Camillus, with the goddess herself imported from the conquered city of Veii. According to Livy, the Romans asked the statue if she wanted to come along, and she said yes.
Around 462 AD. The Byzantine administrative year starts counting from September 1. The Eastern Church keeps it as the start of its liturgical year to this day, and Russia treated September 1 as New Year's Day until Peter the Great moved it to January in 1700. (Nobody can name the exact day this started. It was a bureaucratic drift, not an event.)
672. Wamba becomes king of the Visigoths.
948. Yelü Xian is born. He grows up to be Emperor Jingzong of the Liao dynasty.
1000 to 1499
1054. At the Battle of Atapuerca, Ferdinand I of León-Castile defeats and kills his own brother, García III of Pamplona.
1057. Isaac I Komnenos is crowned in the Hagia Sophia. He abdicates two years later and becomes a monk.
1067. Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, dies. He had been regent of France for the young Philip I.
1145. The high altar of Lund Cathedral is consecrated. Same day, in Valencia, Ibn Jubayr is born. He grows up to write one of the great medieval travel books.
1159. Pope Adrian IV dies at Anagni. He's still the only English pope. A story says he choked on a fly in his wine. It's almost certainly legend.
1173. Stamira dies at the siege of Ancona. Chroniclers say she set the besiegers' siege engines on fire. The story got much bigger in the nineteenth century.
1181. Lucius III is elected pope.
1246. Elisabeth of Bavaria marries Conrad IV, king of Germany and Sicily.
1256. Kujō Yoritsune, the fourth shogun of Kamakura Japan, dies. He had been a figurehead since he was a toddler.
1271. The Conclave With No Roof
Gregory X is elected pope after the Church had gone two years and nine months without one. The cardinals, sitting in Viterbo, simply could not agree, so the locals did something about it. By the usual account, they locked the cardinals into the palace, cut their food down to bread and water, and finally took the roof off. It worked. The man they chose wasn't even in the building. Teobaldo Visconti was off on crusade in Acre and was not yet a priest. He took the name Gregory, came home, and in 1274 pushed through the rules that became the conclave: lock the cardinals in, stop feeding them well. The word is from cum clave, "with a key."
1327. Foulques de Villaret dies. He was the Hospitaller Grand Master who took Rhodes.
1435. Lithuanian civil war: the Battle of Pabaiskas, near Ukmergė. Grand Duke Švitrigaila's army is destroyed.
1449. The Battle of Tumu in China. A Ming army marches out with a eunuch's advice and the emperor on the field. The Zhengtong Emperor is captured within days.
1453. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba is born. Spain will call him "El Gran Capitán."
1485. Giovanni Tornabuoni signs a contract with Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint the main chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. A teenager named Michelangelo is said to have been in the workshop a few years later.
1500 to 1799
1513. Vasco Núñez de Balboa sets out from the Atlantic side of Panama with a few hundred men to find the sea on the other side.
1524. The Treaty of Malmö is signed, helping to settle who runs Denmark and Sweden.
1532. Henry VIII makes Anne Boleyn Marquess of Pembroke. It's a peerage in her own right, not a courtesy title. It was extremely unusual then and still is.
1536. James V of Scotland sails from Kirkcaldy for France to find a bride. He marries Madeleine of Valois in Paris the next January. She is dead by July.
1576. Ismail II takes the Safavid throne, after years in prison. He lasts about a year and may have been poisoned.
1604. The Adi Granth, the first compilation of Sikh scripture, is installed at Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, in Amritsar.
1610. Claudio Monteverdi dates the dedication of his Vespers to Pope Paul V "1 September." It's one of the most important pieces of music ever written, and he may have just been looking for a job.
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1612. The militia of Prince Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin fights outside Moscow, a turning point in pushing the Polish-Lithuanian garrison out of the Kremlin. (The date shifts depending on which calendar you use.)
1632. At the Battle of Castelnaudary, royal troops beat the rebel army of Gaston d'Orléans. The Duke of Montmorency is captured and beheaded in October.
1644. The Battle of Tippermuir in Scotland. It's often called the last battle in Britain where English longbows were used.
1645. The Scots lift their siege of Hereford.
1651. General Monck's army sacks Dundee.
1660. Grigore I Ghica becomes Prince of Wallachia.
1715. The Longest Reign
Louis XIV dies at Versailles, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday. He had been king for 72 years and 110 days, which is the longest verified reign of any sovereign monarch in history. He outlived his son, his grandson and his eldest great-grandson, so the crown went to a five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV, who then reigned for nearly sixty years. On the deathbed, by the usual account, Louis told the boy not to copy him in his taste for building and his love of war. Louis XV did both.
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1729. The Champagne house Ruinart opens its books. It's the oldest in the business.
1730. The ground opens at Timanfaya, Lanzarote. The eruptions last six years and bury villages. Lava.
1745. Catherine of Anhalt-Zerbst marries the future Peter III of Russia. She will become Catherine the Great after he's removed from the throne.
1763. Catherine, by then empress, signs off on a plan for a Moscow foundling home.
1772. Father Junípero Serra founds Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in California.
1774. The Powder Alarm. British troops take gunpowder from a powder house near Boston, and thousands of New England militia turn up expecting a war. Nobody fires a shot.
1800 to 1913
1804. The astronomer Karl Harding, working at Lilienthal in Germany, spots a new moving point of light. It's Juno, the third asteroid ever found.
1807. Aaron Burr, former vice president, is acquitted of treason in Richmond. Acquitted.
1814. The USS Wasp sinks HMS Avon in the English Channel. Weeks later, Wasp is lost with all hands.
1836. Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding arrive at Fort Walla Walla. They are the first white women to cross the Rockies by the Oregon Trail.
1859. The Day the Sun Blinked
Just before noon, an amateur astronomer named Richard Carrington was sketching sunspots from his private observatory in England when two patches of intense white light flared up over the biggest group. He ran off to find a witness. By the time he got back, it had faded. Another observer, Richard Hodgson, saw it independently. At nearly the same moment, the magnetometers at Kew recorded a sudden jump in Earth's magnetic field. That was the first time anyone linked a solar flare to something happening here. The telegraph chaos and the auroras seen as far south as the Caribbean came overnight, into September 2. It's still the strongest geomagnetic storm in the record, and it's why people who think about the power grid are always a little nervous.
1862. Battle of Chantilly, Virginia, fought in a thunderstorm. Union generals Isaac Stevens and Philip Kearny are both killed.
1864. Confederate troops evacuate Atlanta and burn locomotives and boxcars on the way out. The city falls the next day.
1870. The main day of the Battle of Sedan. The French surrender the next morning, and Napoleon III with them.
1872. The Battle of Orange Walk, in British Honduras (now Belize). The Maya of the Icaiché and British troops fight over a fort.
1873. Cetshwayo is crowned king of the Zulu, with a British official, Theophilus Shepstone, helping with the ceremony.
1874. Construction begins on the first stage of the General Post Office in Sydney.
1878. Emma Nutt
Emma Nutt becomes the first woman hired as a telephone operator, at the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company. She started the same day her predecessor, a teenage boy, finally got one too many complaints about his language. Her voice was gentler, and the company liked her so much it hired women for the job pretty much forever. The pay was ten dollars a month for a fifty-four-hour week. She stayed on the switchboard for more than thirty years.
1880. The Battle of Kandahar. Britain's Afghan war ends with a victory by Frederick Roberts, whose march from Kabul has already become famous.
1886. The Grasshopper Club Zürich is founded. It will win more Swiss titles than anyone.
1893. The House of Commons passes the Second Irish Home Rule Bill, 301 to 267. The Lords throw it out a week later.
1894. Hinckley
A wildfire wipes out the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, and several smaller places around it. At least 418 people are killed in under a few hours. A passenger train, the St. Paul & Duluth No. 4, backs through the burning woods with its engineer, James Root, nearly blinded at the throttle. It reaches Skunk Lake, where people jump into shallow water, and survive. The drought was long and the logging slash was everywhere. Hinckley is one of the reasons America started to take wildfire seriously.
1897. The Tremont Street Subway opens in Boston. It's the first subway in North America.
1902. Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon is released, around this date. A rocket in a face.
1904. Griffin Park opens in Brentford, west London. It's the only English league ground with a pub on every corner. Pubs.
1905. Alberta and Saskatchewan become Canadian provinces.
1910. Corinthians is founded in São Paulo by five working men. It becomes one of the biggest clubs in Brazil.
1911. Work begins on the Saline Valley Salt Tram in California. It's a cable system that hauls salt over a mountain range.
1913. The French pilot Adolphe Pégoud flies upside down for the first time.
1913. Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion opens in London.
1914 to 1959
1914. Martha
At about one o'clock in the afternoon, a passenger pigeon named Martha is found dead on the floor of her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. She was twenty-nine, or about that. She was the last passenger pigeon on Earth. A century earlier there were billions, by some estimates, in flocks that blotted out the sky for days. In the end people shot them for food and for sport, and she was alone in a cage. Her body was frozen in a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian.
1914. The Affair of Néry. A British artillery battery is caught by German cavalry in fog and keeps its guns firing. Three men get Victoria Crosses.
1914. Around this date, St. Petersburg is renamed Petrograd, because "Sankt Peterburg" sounded too German.
1915. Germany promises, in the "Arabic pledge," not to sink passenger liners without warning.
1916. Bulgaria declares war on Romania.
1920. The state of Greater Lebanon is proclaimed in Beirut by French General Gouraud.
1921. The battleship USS Washington is launched. Three years later, she's sunk for target practice under the Washington Naval Treaty.
1923. The Great Kantō Earthquake
At 11:58 a.m., just as lunch was being cooked over charcoal and gas, the ground in Japan's Kantō region moved. The earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama, and the fires killed far more than the shaking did. One field in Tokyo, where tens of thousands had fled with their belongings, became a fire tornado. Estimates of the dead run from 105,000 to about 142,000. In the aftermath, rumors spread that Koreans were poisoning wells and setting fires, and vigilante groups and some police and soldiers killed thousands of ethnic Koreans, around 6,000 by common estimates. Japan still holds a Disaster Prevention Day every September 1.
1924. The Dawes Plan takes effect, rescheduling German reparations.
1928. Ahmet Zogu declares himself "Zog I, King of the Albanians." He had been president.
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1934. A huge textile strike begins across the US.
1937. Trans-Canada Air Lines runs its first scheduled flight, Vancouver to Seattle.
1937. The SS Tarpon sinks in the Gulf of Mexico. One survivor swims twenty-five miles to land.
1939. A Very Long Day
Germany invades Poland. The battleship Schleswig-Holstein opens fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte, and the Luftwaffe bombs the town of Wieluń before dawn. It's the start of the Second World War in Europe. A great deal of other things happened the same day. A few of them:
- The journalist Clare Hollingworth, who had spotted German tanks massed on the border, phones the British embassy in Warsaw with the news, and an official says she must be mistaken. She holds the phone out of the window so he can hear the guns.
- George C. Marshall is sworn in as US Army Chief of Staff.
- The BBC Television Service goes off the air for the war. The last thing broadcast is a Mickey Mouse cartoon, Mickey's Gala Premier. Service doesn't come back until June 7, 1946.
- In a physics journal dated the same day, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder publish a paper on gravitational collapse. It's what we'd now call a black hole. It's in the same issue as Bohr and Wheeler's paper on nuclear fission.
- At Hove, the Yorkshire bowler Hedley Verity takes seven wickets for nine runs against Sussex. It was the last county game before the war. Verity died in Italy in 1943.
1941. The Nazi regime orders all Jews in Germany over the age of six to wear a yellow star, effective September 19.
1944. Canadian troops enter Dieppe, where the 1942 raid had failed.
1946. The Turin Grand Prix, which some people call the first Formula One race, is won by Achille Varzi. The same day, Greeks vote 68.4% to bring back the monarchy.
1947. The Dugald train crash in Manitoba. Thirty-one people die.
1951. Australia, New Zealand and the United States sign the ANZUS Treaty.
1952. Life magazine runs all of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in one issue. It sold 5.3 million copies in two days.
1957. A passenger train derails in Kendal, Jamaica. The toll is somewhere between 179 and 200, the worst rail disaster in the island's history.
1958. Iceland extends its fishing limit to twelve nautical miles, and the first Cod War with Britain begins.
1960 to today
1961. The first Non-Aligned Movement summit opens in Belgrade. TWA Flight 529 crashes after takeoff from Midway, Chicago. The Eritrean War of Independence begins.
1962. Channel Television begins broadcasting from the Channel Islands.
1964. Masanori Murakami, a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, becomes the first Japanese player in Major League Baseball. Around then, Soviet children hear "Spokoynoy nochi, malyshi!" ("Good night, little ones!") on TV for the first time. The show is still on.
1966. Ralph Baer, an engineer at a defense contractor, writes a four-page document about playing games on a television set. It's the start of the home video game console.
1967. The Arab League summit in Khartoum ends with the "Three No's": no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations.
1969. Muammar Gaddafi and a group of junior officers overthrow King Idris of Libya. Jornal Nacional debuts on Brazilian TV.
1972. Fischer
Bobby Fischer wins the World Chess Championship in Reykjavík when Boris Spassky resigns the adjourned twenty-first game, by phone, without even playing it out. It's the end of Soviet control of the title, which had lasted twenty-four years. Spassky had fought for weeks, and Fischer had nearly forfeited the whole match by not showing up. It was front-page news in the middle of the Cold War, which is not something chess has done before or since.
1973. Pisces III
A tiny submersible called Pisces III is stuck on the floor of the Atlantic, 1,575 feet down, 150 miles off the coast of Ireland. There are two men inside, Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson. The oxygen is running out and the cabin is freezing. Rescuers use a US Navy robot, CURV-III, to attach a line to the sub. They manage it, and the sub is hauled up. Mallinson and Chapman had been down about three and a half days, and they had maybe twelve minutes of air left.
1973. George Foreman knocks out José "Mono" Roman in the first round in Tokyo. It takes about two minutes.
1974. An SR-71 Blackbird flies from New York to London in 1 hour, 54 minutes, 56.4 seconds. Pilot James Sullivan and navigator Noel Widdifield. It was in a hurry to get to a museum.
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1979. Pioneer 11 becomes the first spacecraft to fly past Saturn, passing about 13,000 miles above the clouds.
1980. Terry Fox ends his Marathon of Hope outside Thunder Bay, Ontario. He'd run on one leg for 143 days and 5,373 kilometers. The cancer had come back.
1981. André Kolingba takes power in a bloodless coup in the Central African Republic.
1982. US Space Command is founded.
1983. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet interceptor over the Sea of Japan. All 269 people on board die.
1985. Titanic
Just after midnight, in the North Atlantic, a camera on a towed sled called Argo sends back an image of a boiler. It's the Titanic, 12,500 feet down and some 370 miles off Newfoundland. The wreck had been missing for seventy-three years. Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel led the expedition. The Navy had paid for the trip, and later accounts say the Navy's real interest was the nuclear submarines Thresher and Scorpion, which were also on the bottom, and the Titanic search was the cover story that came afterward.
2004. The Beslan school siege begins in North Ossetia. It lasts three days.
2008. The US hands control of Anbar Province to Iraqi forces.
2016. An annular solar eclipse crosses Africa. A ring of fire.
2019. Hurricane Dorian hits Great Abaco in the Bahamas as a Category 5 storm, with winds around 185 mph.
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Come back next September 1. Something will have happened.