The morning of September 15, 2008, began with the unthinkable: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the storied Wall Street firm that had survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, and two world wars, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. With more than $600 billion in…
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On September 14, 1814, the gray half-light of dawn, after a night of fire and thunder, the smoke parted over Fort McHenry to reveal what the British had failed to erase. The flag—thirty by forty-two feet, stitched in Baltimore only weeks earlier—still flew defiantly…
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On a cool September morning in 1609, an English mariner in Dutch employ guided his ship into the mouth of a vast and unfamiliar waterway. Henry Hudson, sailing under the flag of the Dutch East India Company, had been searching in vain for a…
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Super Mario, the beloved Italian plumber, made his debut in the world of video games in 1981, but it wasn’t until September 13, 1985, that he truly solidified his place in gaming history with the launch of Super Mario Bros. It all started a…
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On September 12, 2013, NASA announced what many had long awaited but few dared to fully believe: Voyager 1, the space probe launched in 1977, had officially crossed the threshold into interstellar space. After nearly 36 years in flight, the little spacecraft that once…
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On September 11, 1776, in the brief lull following the Battle of Long Island, a small boat ferried three American delegates across the waters of New York Harbor. Their mission was audacious, if not quixotic: to test whether a negotiated peace with Britain might…
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When Elias Howe secured his sewing machine patent on September 10, 1846, he likely could not have imagined the waves of industrial transformation his invention would set in motion. The 27-year-old Massachusetts mechanic had spent years tinkering in obscurity, driven by a vision of…
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In a year already crowded with photographic firsts, Sir John Herschel quietly added another milestone on September 9, 1839: the first successful image fixed on glass. The achievement, overshadowed at the time by the announcements of Louis Daguerre in Paris and William Henry Fox…
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On September 8, 1760, a drama that had unfolded across the North American wilderness reached its decisive conclusion. In the heart of New France, Montreal—last stronghold of French power in Canada—formally surrendered to the British. With that act, the long and bloody struggle of…
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When the guns fell silent in Europe on May 8, 1945, the question of how to commemorate the Allied triumph over Nazi Germany loomed over the victorious powers. The Soviet Union, which had borne the brunt of the war on the Eastern Front and…
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