This Day in History

On Sept. 30, 1777, the Continental Congress – forced to flee in the face of advancing British forces – moved to York, Pennsylvania.

On this date:

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.