22 September 2024 (MIA)

– World Car Free Day

1586 – Battle of Zutphen: Spanish victory over the English and Dutch.

1598 – English playwright Ben Jonson kills actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel and is indicted for manslaughter.

1692 – The last of those convicted of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials are hanged; the remainder of those convicted are all eventually released.

1711 – The Tuscarora War begins in present-day North Carolina.

1761 – George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz are crowned King and Queen, respectively, of the Kingdom of Great Britain.

1776 – Nathan Hale is hanged for spying during American Revolution.

1789 – The office of United States Postmaster General is established.

1789 – Battle of Rymnik establishes Alexander Suvorov as a pre-eminent Russian military commander after his allied army defeat superior Ottoman Empire forces.

1792 – Primidi Vendémiaire of year one of the French Republican Calendar as the French First Republic comes into being.

1823 – Joseph Smith states he found the Golden plates on this date after being directed by God through the Angel Moroni to the place where they were buried.

1857 – The Russian warship Lefort capsizes and sinks during a storm in the Gulf of Finland, killing all 826 aboard.

1862 – Slavery in the United States: A preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation is released.

1866 – Battle of Curupayty in the Paraguayan War.

1885 – Lord Randolph Churchill makes a speech in Ulster in opposition to Home Rule.

1888 – The first issue of National Geographic Magazine is published.

1892 – Lindal Railway Incident, providing inspiration for “The Lost Special” by A.C. Doyle and the TV serial Lost.

1896 – Queen Victoria surpasses her grandfather King George III as the longest reigning monarch in British history.

1908 – The Bulgarian Declaration of Independence is proclaimed.

1910 – The Duke of York’s Picture House opens in Brighton, now the oldest continually operating cinema in Britain.

1914 – German submarine SM U-9 torpedoes and sinks the British cruisers HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy on the Broad Fourteens off the Dutch coast with the loss of over 1,400 men.

1919 – The steel strike of 1919, led by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, begins in Pennsylvania before spreading across the United States.

1927 – Jack Dempsey loses the “Long Count” boxing match to Gene Tunney.

1934 – An explosion takes place at Gresford Colliery in Wales, leading to the deaths of 266 miners and rescuers.

1937 – Spanish Civil War: Peña Blanca is taken, ending the Battle of El Mazuco.

1939 – Joint victory parade of Wehrmacht and Red Army in Brest-Litovsk at the end of the Invasion of Poland.

1941 – World War II: On Jewish New Year Day, the German SS murder 6,000 Jews in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. Those are the survivors of the previous killings that took place a few days earlier in which about 24,000 Jews were executed.

1946 – The first elections for the Constitutional Assembly were held in the People’s Republic of Macedonia.

1955 – In the United Kingdom, the television channel ITV goes live for the first time.

1957 – In Haiti, François Duvalier is elected president.

1960 – The Sudanese Republic is renamed Mali after the withdrawal of Senegal from the Mali Federation.

1965 – The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 (also known as the Second Kashmir War) between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, ends after the UN calls for a ceasefire.

1975 – Sara Jane Moore tries to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford, but is foiled by Oliver Sipple.

1979 – A bright flash, resembling the detonation of a nuclear weapon, is observed near the Prince Edward Islands. Its cause is never determined.

1980 – Iraq invades Iran.

1991 – The Dead Sea Scrolls are made available to the public for the first time by the Huntington Library.

1993 – A barge strikes a railroad bridge near Mobile, Alabama, causing the deadliest train wreck in Amtrak history. Forty-seven passengers are killed.

1993 – A Transair Georgian Airlines Tu-154 is shot down by a missile in Sukhumi, Georgia.

1993 – Macedonia joins World Energy Council.

1995 – An E-3B AWACS crashes outside Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska after multiple bird strikes to two of the four engines soon after takeoff; all 24 on board are killed.

1995 – Nagerkovil school bombing, is carried out by the Sri Lanka Air Force in which at least 34 die, most of them ethnic Tamil schoolchildren.

2013 – At least 75 people are killed in a suicide bombing at a Christian church in Peshawar, Pakistan.