Sept. 19 historic events
1777 American soldiers won the first Battle of Saratoga during the Revolutionary War.
1796 President George Washington’s farewell address was published. In it, America’s first chief executive advised, “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”
1870 Franco-Prussian War: the Siege of Paris begins, which will result on January 28, 1871 in the surrender of Paris and a decisive Prussian victory.
1881 President James A. Garfield dies of wounds suffered in a July 2 shooting. (Botched medical care after the shooting led to his death. This included the failure of a metal-detector to find the bullet – no one thought to move Garfield off of the metal-springed bed he was lying on.)
1934 Bruno Hauptmann is arrested for the kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr.
1940 Witold Pilecki is voluntarily captured and sent to Auschwitz in order to smuggle out information and start a resistance.
1942 Holocaust in Brody, western Ukraine: About 2,500 Brody Jews are deported by the German Gestapo to the extermination camp in Belzec.
1945 Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) is sentenced to death in London. ( He was one of the famous Axis propogandists who used to broadcast regularly to Alied troops. Others included Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally.)
1957 First American underground nuclear bomb test.
1959 Nikita Khrushchev is barred from visiting Disneyland.
1976 Turkish Airlines Boeing 727 hits the Taurus Mountains, outskirt of Karatepe, Osmaniye, Turkey, killing all 155 passengers and crew.
1982 Emoticons were born when Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman proposed punctuating humorous or sarcastic computer messages with a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis as a horizontal “smiley face.” 🙂
1985 The Mexico City area was struck by the first of two devastating earthquakes that claimed some 6,000 lives and destroyed 400 buildings.
1985 Tipper Gore and other political wives form the Parents Music Resource Center as Frank Zappa and other musicians testify at U.S. Congressional hearings on obscenity in rock music.
1995 The Washington Post and The New York Times publish the Unabomber’s manifesto. (This led directly to the capture of the unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, when his brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. As part of his brother’s deal with the government, Kaczynski didn’t face the death-penalty for his crimes.)
2001 The Pentagon ordered combat aircraft to the Persian Gulf in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
2002 President George W. Bush asked Congress for authority to “use all means,” including military force if necessary, to disarm and overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein if he did not quickly meet United Nations demands to abandon all weapons of mass destruction.
2008 Struggling to stave off financial catastrophe, the Bush administration asked Congress for $700 billion to buy up troubled mortgage-related assets from U.S. financial institutions. (TARP – Troubled Assets Relief Program – was a classic bait-and-switch according to many of its critics.)
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