September 12 - Events

Events

• 490 BC – Battle of Marathon: The conventionally accepted date for the Battle of Marathon. The Athenians and their Plataean allies, defeat the first Persian invasion force of Greece.
• 372 – Sixteen Kingdoms: Jin Xiaowudi, age 10, succeeds his father Jin Jianwendi as Emperor of the Eastern Jin Dynasty.
• 1213 – Albigensian Crusade: Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, defeats Peter II of Aragon at the Battle of Muret.
• 1229 – The Aragonese army under the command of James I of Aragon disembarks at Santa Ponça, Majorca, with the purpose of conquering the island.
• 1609 – Henry Hudson begins his exploration of the Hudson River while aboard the Halve Maen.
• 1683 – Austro-Ottoman War: Battle of Vienna – several European armies join forces to defeat the Ottoman Empire.
• 1814 – Battle of North Point: an American detachment halts the British land advance to Baltimore in the War of 1812.
• 1846 – Elizabeth Barrett elopes with Robert Browning.
• 1847 – Mexican-American War: the Battle of Chapultepec begins.
• 1848 – Switzerland becomes a Federal state.
• 1857 – The SS Central America sinks about 160 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, drowning a total of 426 passengers and crew, including Captain William Lewis Herndon. The ship was carrying 13–15 tons of gold from the San Francisco Gold Rush.
• 1874 – The District of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada is founded.
• 1885 – Arbroath 36–0 Bon Accord, a world record scoreline in professional football.
• 1890 – Salisbury, Rhodesia, is founded.
• 1897 – Tirah Campaign: Battle of Saragarhi.
• 1906 – The Newport Transporter Bridge is opened in Newport, South Wales by Viscount Tredegar.
• 1910 – Premiere performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8 in Munich (with a chorus of 852 singers and an orchestra of 171 players. Mahler's rehearsal assistant conductor was Bruno Walter)
• 1919 – Adolf Hitler joins the German Workers Party.
• 1930 – In cricket Wilfred Rhodes ends his 1110-game first-class career by taking 5 for 95 for H.D.G. Leveson Gower's XI against the Australians.
• 1933 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.
• 1938 – Adolf Hitler demands autonomy and self-determination for the Germans of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.
• 1940 – Cave paintings are discovered in Lascaux, France.
• 1940 – An explosion at the Hercules Powder Company plant in Kenvil, New Jersey kills 51 people and injures over 200.
• 1942 – World War II: RMS Laconia, carrying civilians, Allied soldiers and Italian POWs is torpedoed off the coast of West Africa and sinks with a heavy loss of life.
• 1942 – World War II: First day of the Battle of Edson's Ridge during the Guadalcanal campaign. U.S. Marines protecting Henderson Field on Guadalcanal are attacked by Imperial Japanese Army forces.
• 1943 – World War II: Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, is rescued from house arrest on the Gran Sasso in Abruzzi, by German commando forces led by Otto Skorzeny.
• 1944 – World War II: The liberation of Serbia from Nazi Germany continues. Bajina Bašta in western Serbia is among those liberated cities. Near Trier, American troops enter Germany for the first time.
• 1948 – Invasion of the State of Hyderabad by the Indian Army on the day after the Pakistani leader Jinnah's death.
• 1952 – Strange occurrences, including a monster sighting, take place in Flatwoods, West Virginia.
• 1953 – U.S. Representative John Fitzgerald Kennedy marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island.
• 1958 – Jack Kilby demonstrates the first integrated circuit.
• 1959 – Premiere of Bonanza, the first regularly scheduled TV program presented in color.
• 1959 – The Soviet Union launches a large rocket, Lunik II, at the moon.
• 1961 – The African and Malagasy Union is founded.
• 1964 – Canyonlands National Park is designated as a National Park.
• 1966 – Gemini 11, the penultimate mission of NASA's Gemini program, and the current human altitude record holder (except for the Apollo lunar missions)
• 1970 – Palestinian terrorists blow up three hijacked airliners in Jordan, continuing to hold the passengers hostage in various undisclosed locations in Amman.
• 1974 – Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, 'Messiah' of the Rastafari movement, is deposed following a military coup by the Derg, ending a reign of 58 years.
• 1974 – Juventude Africana Amilcar Cabral is founded in Guinea-Bissau.
• 1977 – South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko is killed in police custody.
• 1979 – Indonesia is hit with an earthquake that measures 8.1 on the Richter scale.
• 1980 – Military coup in Turkey.
• 1983 – A Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, Connecticut, United States, is robbed of approximately US$7 million by Los Macheteros.
• 1983 – The USSR vetoes a UN Security Council Resolution deploring the Soviet shooting down of a Korean civilian jetliner on September 1.
• 1984 – Dwight Gooden sets the baseball record for strikeouts in a season by a rookie with 246, previously set by Herb Score in 1954. Gooden's 276 strikeouts that season, pitched in 218 innings, set the current record.
• 1988 – Hurricane Gilbert devastates Jamaica; it turns towards Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 2 days later, causing an estimated $5 billion in damage.
• 1990 – The two German states and the Four Powers sign the Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany in Moscow, paving the way for German re-unification.
• 1992 – NASA launches Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-47 which marked the 50th shuttle mission. On board are Mae Carol Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, Mamoru Mohri, the first Japanese citizen to fly in a US spaceship, and Mark Lee and Jan Davis, the first married couple in space.
• 1992 – Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Shining Path, is captured by Peruvian special forces; shortly thereafter the rest of Shining Path's leadership fell as well.
• 1994 – Frank Eugene Corder crashes a single-engine Cessna 150 into the White House's south lawn, striking the West wing and killing himself.
• 1999 – Indonesia announces it will allow international peace-keepers into East Timor.
• 2001 – Ansett Australia, Australia's first commercial interstate airline, collapses due to increased strain on the international airline industry, leaving 10,000 people unemployed.
• 2003 – The United Nations lifts sanctions against Libya after that country agreed to accept responsibility and recompense the families of victims in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
• 2003 – In Fallujah, US forces mistakenly shoot and kill eight Iraqi police officers.
• 2005 – Hong Kong Disneyland opens in Penny's Bay, Lantau Island, Hong Kong.
• 2007 – Former Philippine President Joseph Estrada is convicted of the crime of plunder.
• 2008 – The 2008 Chatsworth train collision in Los Angeles between a Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train kills 25 people.
• 2011 – The 9/11 Memorial Museum opens to the public.