This Day In History is not returning on a regular basis, but there are some days in which the events that unfolded make it impossible to ignore. September 11th is one of those days.

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 Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart.

The Battle of Stirling Bridge was portrayed in the movie – without the bridge. When asked by a local why the Battle of Stirling Bridge was filmed on an open plain, Gibson answered that “the bridge got in the way.”  “Aye,” the local answered. “That’s what the English found.”
The bridge did collapse during the attack. There is no definitive account or explanation of the mechanism of the structural failure. Some accounts attribute the collapse to the Scottish saying they deliberately weakened the bridge to sabotage the English attack. 
Some accounts assert that the English destroyed the bridge to hinder the Scottish pursuit of the retreating English soldiers. Some historians say that the bridge was merely overloaded which caused the collapse. In any event, the bridge seemed to have been extremely overloaded and collapsed mid-battle.

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.

1851 – Christiana, PA was the site of the Battle of Christiana, in which local residents defended with firearms a fugitive slave, killing the slave owner. Southerners demanded the hanging of those responsible, who were accused of treason and making war on the United States, but after the first defendant was acquitted, the government dropped the case. 

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.

1923 – NFL Hall of Fame football coach (Dallas Cowboys) Tom Landry was born.

1941 – In a speech at an America First rally at the Des Moines 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.

1962 – The Beatles, with session drummer Andy White substituting for Ringo Starr – at producer George Martin’s insistence – recorded Love Me Do and PS I Love You.
The Beatles recorded Love Me Do three times. The first was at their EMI audition on June 6, 1962, featuring Pete Best on drums. They returned to the song during a September 4, 1962 session, which featured Ringo on drums.
It is White’s version which appears on the single version and the Please Please Me album. Ringo’s drumming can be heard on Past Masters, Volume One, released in England in 1978 and the U.S. in 1980. The recording featuring Pete Best appeared on Anthology 1 in 1995.

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.

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. 

1998 – Independent counsel Kenneth Starr sent a report to the U.S. Congress accusing President Bill Clinton of 11 possible impeachable offenses.

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.  It crashed in a rural field in western Pennsylvania at 10:10a.m.

2001 – In what has to be the worst case of timing in music history, Dream Theater released their ‘Live Scenes From New York’ album. The cover artwork featured an apple (as in the Big Apple) on fire (notice the Twin Towers and the Statue of Liberty on top of the apple) and wrapped in barbed wire. The band quickly announced the album would be released with new artwork.

2002 – Football Hall of Famer Johnny Unitas died of a heart attack at the age of 69.

2003 – Actor John Ritter (Three’s Company, 8 Simple Rules, Sling Blade) died during surgery to repair an aortic dissection. He was 54.

2012 – The U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was stormed, looted and burned down, killing four Americans; U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
In the weeks following the attack, President Barack Obama and other administration officials claimed that a video, Innocence Of Muslims, had sparked outrage across the Muslim world and was the catalyst for the attack. “What we’ve seen over the last week, week and a half, is something that actually we’ve seen in the past, where there is an offensive video or cartoon directed at the prophet Muhammad. And this is obviously something that then is used as an excuse by some to carry out inexcusable violent acts directed at Westerners or Americans.”
That claim was later proven to be completely false.

2014 – Songwriter and producer Bob Crewe, best known for his work with The Four Seasons, died at the age of 82.

Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2015 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.