Today in history
On Sept. 30, 1777, the Continental Congress — forced to flee in the face of advancing British forces — moved to York, Pennsylvania.
In 1399, England’s King Richard II was deposed by Parliament; he was succeeded by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, who was crowned as King Henry IV.
In 1846, Boston dentist William Morton used ether as an anesthetic for the first time as he extracted an ulcerated tooth from merchant Eben Frost.
In 1938, after co-signing the Munich Agreement allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said, “I believe it is peace for our time.”
In 1939, the first college football game to be televised was shown on experimental station W2XBS in New York as Fordham University defeated Waynesburg College, 34-7.
In 1949, the Berlin Airlift came to an end. In 1952, the motion picture “This Is Cinerama,” which introduced the triple-camera, triple-projector Cinerama widescreen process, premiered at the Broadway Theatre in New York.
In 1954, the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned by the U.S. Navy.
In 1955, actor James Dean, 24, was killed in a two-car collision near Cholame, California.
In 1962, James Meredith, a black student, was escorted by federal marshals to the campus of the University of Mississippi, where he enrolled for classes the next day; Meredith’s presence sparked rioting that claimed two lives.
In 1972, Roberto Clemente hit a double against Jon Matlack of the New York Mets during Pittsburgh’s 5-0 victory at Three Rivers Stadium; the hit was the 3,000th and last for the Pirates star.
In 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev retired President Andrei A. Gromyko from the Politburo and fired other old-guard leaders in a Kremlin shake-up.
In 2001, under threat of U.S. military strikes, Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban rulers said explicitly for the first time that Osama bin Laden was still in the country and that they knew where his hideout was located.
Ten years ago: A powerful earthquake rocked western Indonesia, killing 1,115 people. A Soyuz spacecraft carrying Canadian circus tycoon Guy Laliberte and two crew mates lifted off from Kazakhstan, headed for the International Space Station.
Five years ago: Under withering criticism from Congress, Secret Service Director Julia Pierson admitted failures in her agency’s critical mission of protecting the president but repeatedly sidestepped key questions about how a knife-carrying intruder penetrated ring after ring of security before finally being tackled deep inside the White House. U.S. and Afghan officials signed a long-delayed security pact to keep nearly 10,000 American forces in Afghanistan beyond the planned final withdrawal of U.S. and international combat forces at the end of the year. The first case of Ebola diagnosed in the U.S. was confirmed in a patient who had recently traveled from Liberia to Dallas. Jerry Brown signed the nation’s first statewide ban on single-use plastic bags at grocery and convenience stores.
One year ago: U.S. and Canadian officials announced an agreement for Canada to take part in a revamped North American free trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico; the new agreement would be called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. As part of a new one-week investigation, FBI agents interviewed Deborah Ramirez, one of the three women who had accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. With more than 800 already confirmed dead from an earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia, rescuers struggled to reach additional victims in several large coastal towns.