Sept. 12 historic events
1609 Henry Hudson began his exploration of the Hudson River while aboard the Halve Maen. (“Half Moon” to us English-speakers.)
1814 Battle of North Point: an American detachment halts the British land advance to Baltimore in the War of 1812.
1857 The SS Central America sinks about 160 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, drowning a total of 426 passengers and crew, including Captain William Lewis Herndon. The ship was carrying 13-15 tons of gold from the San Francisco Gold Rush. (A treasure-trove of gold coins [over $100,000,000] has been recovered from the wreck in recent years.)
1918 U.S. forces led by Gen. John J. Pershing launched a successful attack on the German-occupied St. Mihiel salient north of Verdun, France, during World War I.
1919 Adolf Hitler YM”S joins the German Workers Party.
1938 Adolf Hitler demands autonomy and self-determination for the Germans of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.
1940 Cave paintings are discovered in Lascaux, France.
1942 World War II: RMS Laconia, carrying civilians, Allied soldiers and Italian POWs is torpedoed off the coast of West Africa and sinks.
1942 World War II: First day of the Battle of Edson’s Ridge during the Guadalcanal campaign. U.S. Marines protecting Henderson Field on Guadalcanal are attacked by Imperial Japanese Army forces.
1943 World War II: Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, is rescued from house arrest on the Gran Sasso in Abruzzi, by German commando forces led by Otto Skorzeny. (He was later captured and executed by Italian partisans.)
1953 Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Newport, R.I.
1958 Jack Kilby demonstrates the first integrated circuit.
1959 The Soviet Union launches a large rocket, Lunik II, at the moon.
1966 Gemini 11, the penultimate mission of NASA’s Gemini program, and the current human altitude record holder (except for the Apollo lunar missions).
1970 Palestinian terrorists blow up three hijacked airliners in Jordan, continuing to hold the passengers hostage in various undisclosed locations in Amman.
1974 Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, ‘Messiah’ of the Rastafari movement, is deposed following a military coup by the Derg, ending a reign of 58 years.
1977 South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko is killed in police custody.
1983 A Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, Connecticut, United States, is robbed of approximately $7,000,000 by Los Macheteros.
1983 The USSR vetoes a UN Security Council Resolution deploring the Soviet shooting down of a Korean civilian jetliner on September 1. (The Soviet pilots involved in the shoot-down knew it was a civilian airliner, as transcripts of their radio conversations revealed that they saw its navigation lights blinking. After initially lying about the shoot-down, the Soviet Union admitted to it, but claimed that the plane was on a spy mission for the U.S. The full story is too long to post here, but evidence indicates that this was a cold-blooded shootdown of a known civillian airliner, with the resulting deaths of all passenfers and crew aboard.)
1990 The two German states and the Four Powers sign the Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany in Moscow, paving the way for German re-unification.
1992 NASA launches Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-47 which marked the 50th shuttle mission. On board are Mae Carol Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, Mamoru Mohri, the first Japanese citizen to fly in a US spaceship, and Mark Lee and Jan Davis, the first married couple in space.
2001 President George W. Bush labeled the previous day’s terrorist attacks “acts of war” and asked Congress for $20 billion to rebuild and recover.
2002 President George W. Bush told skeptical world leaders at the United Nations to confront the “grave and gathering danger” of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or stand aside as the United States acted.
2003 The United Nations lifts sanctions against Libya after that country agreed to accept responsibility and recompense the families of victims in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
2005 Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown resigned, three days after losing his onsite command of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
2006 In a speech in his native Germany, Pope Benedict XVI quoted from an obscure medieval text that characterized some teachings of Islam’s founder as “evil and inhuman,” unleashing a torrent of rage across the Islamic world.
2008 A Metrolink commuter train struck a freight train head-on in Los Angeles, killing 25 people. (Federal investigators have said the Metrolink engineer, Robert Sanchez, had been text-messaging on his cell phone and ran a red light shortly before the crash.)
(Thank you to whoever corrected the earlier post.)