This date is significant for reasons we know all too well. However, long before 2001, there were many, many other events which make September 11 truly ‘A Day From Hell’.
ON SEPTEMBER 11…
1297 – William Wallace led an army of 10,000 Scots to victory over an English Army of 25,000 at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. The battle was depicted – although not entirely accurately – in the film “Braveheart“.
1609 – Explorer Henry Hudson sailed into New York harbor and discovered Manhattan Island and the Hudson River.
1649 – At the Massacre of Drogheda, Ireland, Oliver Cromwell – Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England – ordered the deaths of 3000 English Royalist and Irish Confederate soldiers.
1683 – At the Battle of Vienna, the Holy Roman Empire, in league with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, began a 2-day victorious battle versus the Ottoman Empire. The battle resulted in over 50,000 casualties.
1777 – General Sir William Howe and General Charles Cornwallis launched a full-scale British attack on General George Washington and the Patriot outpost at Brandywine Creek near Chadds Ford, in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
1792 – During the early stages of the French Revolution, a group of thieves broke into the Garde-Meuble (Royal Storehouse) and stole most of the Crown Jewels – including the Hope Diamond – during a five-day looting spree.
1814 – At the Battle of Plattsburgh (a/k/a Battle of Lake Champlain), British forces were defeated by the U.S., effectively bringing an end to the War of 1812.
1842 – Nearly seven years after the Battle of The Alamo, 1,600 Mexican troops attacked San Antonio, killing many of the town’s defenders and carrying off many others as prisoners.
1847 – Stephen Foster performed his “Oh! Susanna” for the very first time. The performance, for a crowd at the Eagle Saloon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, earned Foster a bottle of whiskey.
1857 – Approximately 120 men, women and children in a wagon train en route to California from Arkansas were murdered by Mormon militiamen at the Mountain Meadows Massacre in southern Utah.
1906 – Mahatma Gandhi coined the word Satyagraha (“the Force which is born of Truth and Love”).
1913 – College Hall of Fame football coach (Alabama) Paul William”Bear” Bryant was born.
1921 – Fatty Arbuckle, a silent-film era performer at the height of his fame, was arrested in San Francisco for the rape and murder of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle was later acquitted by a jury, but the scandal essentially put an end to his career.
1941 – In a speech at an America First rally at the DesMoines Coliseum, aviator Charles Lindbergh sparked charges of anti-Semitism when he blamed “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration” for trying to draw the United States into World War II.
1941 – Ground was broken as construction of the Pentagon began.
1954 – The Miss America Pageant was televised – live coast-to-coast – for the first time.
1964 – The last of the “Gillette Friday Night Fights” was seen on television.
1967 – The “Carol Burnett Show” debuted on CBS.
1971 – Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, one of the most significant figures of the Cold War, died.
1973 – Chile’s armed forces staged a coup d’état against the government of President Salvador Allende. He survived the attack but reportedly committed suicide – although many still believe he was murdered – as troops stormed the burning palace.
1974 – “Little House On The Prairie” premiered on NBC.
1978 – Gerald and Charlene Adelle Gallego began a two-year killing spree in Sacramento, CA. They killed a total of 10 victims, mostly teenagers, whom they kept as sex slaves before killing them.
1985 – Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb’s all-time hits record with his 4,192nd hit.
1987 – Actor Lorne Greene of “Bonanza” fame died of complications from pneumonia, following ulcer surgery.
1998 – Independent counsel Kenneth Starr sent a report to the U.S. Congress accusing President Bill Clinton of 11 possible impeachable offenses.
1987 – Dan Rather of the “CBS Evening News” left the newscast when a televised tennis match ran two minutes over. He was missing for six minutes.
1988 – The Saint-Jean Bosco massacre took place in Haiti. At the conclusion of a three-hour rampage on the Saint-Jean Bosco church packed with 1000 parishioners, the church was burned down thereby making it impossible to verify the total number of deaths.
2001 – At 8:45 a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
18 minutes after the first plane hit, a second Boeing 767 – United Airlines Flight 175 – appeared out of the sky, turned sharply toward the World Trade Center,and sliced into the south tower. Close to 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center and its vicinity, including a staggering 343 firefighters and paramedics, 23 New York City police officers, and 37 Port Authority police officers.
American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters at 9:45a.m. United Flight 93, hijacked about 40 minutes after leaving Newark International Airport in New Jersey, crashed in a rural field in western Pennsylvania at 10:10a.m.
2002 – Football Hall of Famer Johnny Unitas died at the age of 69.
2012 – The U.S.consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was stormed, looted and burned down, killing five people, including U.S.ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2014 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.
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