THIS WEEK IN HISTORY
Sunday, Sept. 24
1869: Thousands of businessmen were ruined in a Wall Street panic known as “Black Friday” after financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market.
1968: The TV news magazine “60 Minutes” premiered on CBS.
1976: Former hostage Patricia Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison for her part in a 1974 bank robbery in San Francisco carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
2015: A stampede and crush of Muslim pilgrims occurred at an intersection near a holy site in Saudi Arabia; The Associated Press estimated that more than 2,400 people were killed, while the official Saudi toll stood at 769.
2020: President Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he were to lose the November election drew swift blowback from both parties in Congress, with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell saying that the winner “will be inaugurated on January 20th.”
Monday, Sept. 25
1513: Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and sighted the Pacific Ocean.
1789: The first United States Congress adopted 12 amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. (Ten of the amendments became the Bill of Rights.)
1957: Nine Black students who’d been forced to withdraw from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, because of unruly white crowds were escorted to class by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division.
1964: The sitcom “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” starring Jim Nabors, premiered on CBS.
1981: Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the first female justice on the Supreme Court.
2016: Golf legend Arnold Palmer died at age 87.
2017: Former congressman Anthony Weiner was sentenced to 21 months behind bars for illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl.
2018: Bill Cosby was sentenced to three-to-10 years in prison for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home. (After serving nearly three years, Cosby went free in June 2021 after the Pennsylvania Supreme
Court overturned his conviction.)
2020: The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lay in state at the U.S. Capitol, making history as the first woman so honored in the United States.
Tuesday, Sept. 26
1888: Poet T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri.
1960: The first-ever debate between presidential nominees took place as Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon faced off before a national TV audience from Chicago.
1986: William H. Rehnquist was sworn in as the 16th chief justice of the United States, while Antonin Scalia joined the Supreme Court as its 103rd member.
2005: Army Pfc. Lynndie England was convicted by a military jury in Fort
Hood, Texas, on six of seven counts stemming from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
2008: Hollywood screen legend and philanthropist Paul Newman died in Westport, Connecticut, at age 83.
2016: Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton participated in their first debate of the presidential campaign at Hofstra University in New York.
2020: President Donald Trump nominated judge Amy Coney Barrett, a former clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, to the Supreme Court, to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Barrett would be confirmed the following month.)
2021: The Rolling Stones launched their pandemic-delayed “No Filter” tour in St. Louis without their drummer of nearly six decades, Charlie Watts, who had died in August at age 80.
Wednesday, Sept. 27
1825: The first locomotive to haul a passenger train was operated by George Stephenson in England.
1939: Warsaw, Poland, surrendered after weeks of resistance to invading forces from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.
1956: Olympic track and field gold medalist and Hall of Fame golfer Babe Didrikson Zaharias died in Galveston, Texas, at age 45.
1964: The government publicly released the report of the Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
1979: Congress gave its final approval to forming the U.S. Department of Education.
1999: Sen. John McCain of Arizona officially opened his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, the same day former Vice President Dan Quayle dropped his White House bid. 2021: R&B superstar R. Kelly was convicted in a sex trafficking trial in New York, after decades of avoiding criminal responsibility for numerous allegations of misconduct with young women and children.
Thursday, Sept. 28
1781: American forces in the Revolutionary War, backed by a French fleet, began their successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia.
1920: Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted for allegedly throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. (All were acquitted at trial, but all eight were banned from the game for life.)
1928: Scottish medical researcher Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first effective antibiotic.
1939: During World War II, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty calling for the partitioning of Poland, which the two countries had invaded.
1995: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat signed an accord at the White House ending Israel’s military occupation of West Bank cities and laying the foundation for a Palestinian state.
2000: Capping a 12-year battle, the government approved use of the abortion pill RU-486.
2020: The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus pandemic topped 1million, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University.
2022: Hurricane Ian barreled ashore in southwestern Florida as a massive Category 4 storm. About 2.5million people were ordered to evacuate before the storm hit the coast with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph.
Friday, Sept. 29
1965: President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, creating the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
1978: Pope John Paul I was found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman
Catholic Church.
1982: Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with deadly cyanide claimed the first of seven victims in the Chicago area. (To date, the case remains unsolved.)
1989: Actor Zsa Zsa Gabor was convicted of battery for slapping Beverly Hills police officer Paul Kramer after he’d pulled over her Rolls-Royce for expired license plates.
2000: Israeli riot police stormed a major Jerusalem shrine and opened fire on stone-throwing Muslim worshippers, killing four Palestinians and wounding 175.
2018: Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, agreed to pay a total of $40 million to settle a government lawsuit.
2021: A judge in Los Angeles suspended Britney Spears’ father from the conservatorship that had controlled her life and money for 13 years, saying the arrangement reflected a “toxic environment.”
Saturday, Sept. 30
1791: Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” premiered in Vienna, Austria.
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.”
1947: The World Series was broadcast on television for the first time; the New York Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers 5-3 in Game 1 (the Yankees went on to win the Series four games to three).
1954: The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned by the U.S. Navy.
1955: Actor James Dean was killed at age 24 in a two-car collision near Cholame, California.
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 left two people dead.
1972: Pittsburgh Pirates star Roberto Clemente’s had his 3,000th, and final, hit, a double against Jon Matlack of the New York Mets at Three Rivers Stadium.
2001: Under threat of U.S. military strikes, Afghanistan’s hardline 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.