Also on this date
the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama were devastated by an earthquake that claimed some 140,000 lives.
In 1923,
In 1941,
the first municipally owned parking building in the United States opened in Welch, West Virginia.
In 1942,
U.S. District Court Judge Martin I. Welsh, ruling from Sacramento, California, on a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Fred Korematsu, upheld the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans as well as Japanese nationals.
In 1945,
Americans received word of Japan’s formal surrender that ended World War II. (Because of the time difference, it was Sept. 2 in Tokyo Bay, where the ceremony took place.)
In 1969,
a coup in Libya brought Moammar Gadhafi to power.
American Bobby Fischer won the international chess crown in Reykjavik, Iceland, as Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union resigned before the resumption of Game 21.
In 1972,
In 1983,
269 people were killed when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter after the airliner entered Soviet airspace.
In 1985,
a U.S.-French expedition located the wreckage of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles off Newfoundland.
In 2005,
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a “desperate SOS” as his city descended into anarchy amid the flooding left by Hurricane Katrina.
In 2009,
Vermont’s law allowing same-sex marriage went into effect.
A man upset with the Discovery Channel’s programming took two employees and a security officer hostage at the network’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland; police shot and killed the gunman, James Jae Lee, and all three hostages escaped safely.
Invoking “God’s authority,” Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis denied marriage licenses to gay couples again in direct defiance of the federal courts, and vowed not to resign, even under the pressure of steep fines or jail.
The United States and China put into effect their latest tariff increases on each other’s goods; the 15% U.S. taxes applied to about $112 billion of Chinese imports.
Associated Press