Democrat and Chronicle

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY

Sunday, Sept. 8

1504: Michelange­lo’s statue of David, the Biblical hero who used a slingshot to slay the giant Goliath, was unveiled to the public in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy.

1966: The landmark science fiction television series “Star Trek” premiered with the episode “The Man Trap.” The original series aired over three seasons with 79 episodes.

1974: President Gerald Ford signed the pardon of Richard Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office. The unpreceden­ted move to absolve Nixon of any criminal charges related to the Watergate break-in and its cover-up generated national controvers­y, but some of the pardon’s biggest critics, including Watergate journalist­s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, later approved.

1986: Oprah Winfrey’s local program “A.M. Chicago” launched nationally under the new name “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

2022: Queen Elizabeth II, the United Kingdom’s longest-serving monarch, died at her Scottish estate, Balmoral Castle, at the age of 96. Her son, Charles III, ascended to the throne.

Monday, Sept. 9

1776: The Second Continenta­l Congress officially declared the name of the new nation to be the “United States of America,” replacing the term “United Colonies” that had been commonly used.

1942: During World War II, a Japanese floatplane launched from a submarine carried out the first aerial bombardmen­t of the U.S. mainland by dropping incendiary bombs on Oregon’s forests. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered a news blackout about the attack.

1971: Inmates at the Attica Correction­al Facility in New York initiated an uprising by taking control of the prison, demanding better living conditions and rights. The siege lasted for four days, during which they held guards hostage and negotiated for reforms. A total of 43 men died – 33 inmates and 10 guards.

Tuesday, Sept. 10

1846: Elias Howe was awarded the first U.S. patent for a sewing machine using a lockstitch design.

1897: George Smith, a 25-year-old London taxi driver, became the first person to be arrested for drunk driving after crashing his cab into a building. Smith pleaded guilty and was fined 25 shillings.

1919: Nearly one year after an armistice officially ended World War I, New York City held a parade to welcome home Gen. John J. Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expedition­ary Force. The parade featured 25,000 U.S. soldiers who had served in the AEF’s 1st Division, marching in full combat gear down Fifth Avenue.

1962: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Black student James Meredith had the right to be admitted to the University of Mississipp­i. This decision led to a confrontat­ion with state officials and required federal interventi­on to enforce the court’s order.

1991: Nirvana’s song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released as the lead single from the band’s second album, “Nevermind.”

2000: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Cats” ended its historic run at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. The production opened on Oct. 7, 1982, and became one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history, with a total of 7,485 performanc­es.

2008: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerato­r, was powered up in Geneva, Switzerlan­d.

Wednesday, Sept. 11

1789: Alexander Hamilton took the oath of office as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury.

2001: A series of coordinate­d terrorist attacks took place in the United States using four planes hijacked by 19 members of al-Qaida. Two crashed into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City, bringing down both towers, a third crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a fourth crashed into a field near Shanksvill­e, Pennsylvan­ia. A total of 2,977 people died in the attacks, the worst on American soil since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

2012: Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. This assault resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christophe­r Stevens.

Thursday, Sept. 12

1953: Massachuet­ts Sen. John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island.

1962: President John F. Kennedy rallied the nation with his iconic “we choose to go to the moon” speech at Rice University in Houston, seeking public backing for the ambitious lunar mission to safely land a man on the moon and return him by the end of the 1960s.

1974: In Boston, the first day of courtmanda­ted school busing erupted in violence, with Black children aboard school buses assaulted with eggs, bricks and bottles. In October, the National Guard was called out to enforce the federal desegregat­ion order.

1974: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was overthrown during a military coup by the Derg, a Marxist-Leninist junta. The coup d’etat marked the end of the Solomonic Dynasty’s rule over Ethiopia, which began in 1270.

1995: The 8,829-game winning streak of the Harlem Globetrott­ers came to an end with a 91-85 loss to “Kareem’s AllStars” in Vienna.

Friday, Sept. 13

1948: With her election to the U.S. Senate, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine made history as the first woman to serve in both chambers of Congress, first as a representa­tive (1940-1949) and then as a senator (1949-1973).

1963: Mary Kay Ash launched her Mary Kay cosmetics company in Dallas with a $5,000 investment.

1985: Super Mario Bros. was released in Japan for the Nintendo Entertainm­ent System.

1993: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with PLO Chair Yasser Arafat at the White House to affirm the signing of the Oslo Accords, a major step toward peace between Israelis and Palestinia­ns.

Saturday, Sept. 14

1847: Gen. Winfield Scott led U.S. forces to victory in the Mexican-American War by capturing Mexico City. This decisive action led to the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848, which formally ended the war and gave the U.S. territory that later became California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

1901: President William McKinley died eight days after being shot by an anarchist during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He was the third U.S. president to be assassinat­ed, following Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and James Garfield in 1881.

1956: IBM introduced its 305 RAMAC, the world’s first commercial computer to feature a moving-head hard disk drive for secondary storage.

1985: “The Golden Girls” made its debut on NBC. The sitcom, starring Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty, revolved around four older women sharing a home in Miami.

– Cherie Saunders, USA TODAY Network