On a warm Roman evening inside the Palazzo dello Sport, a tall, brash, and quick-footed 18-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky, danced his way into history. Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.—the world would later know him as Muhammad Ali—captured the light heavyweight gold medal at the Rome…
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On September 4, 1951, American television ceased to be a regional novelty and became a truly national medium. That day, viewers from coast to coast watched the same event at the same time: the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco, carried live across…
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On September 3, 1838, a twenty-year-old enslaved man named Frederick Bailey (later Frederick Douglass) made his bid for freedom. His escape from bondage, carried out with quiet audacity on the railroads and waterways of the Mid-Atlantic, would alter not only the course of his…
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The morning of September 2, 1945, dawned over Tokyo Bay with a clarity that belied the devastation of the preceding years. Aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored proudly among a fleet of Allied warships, representatives of the major warring powers assembled to witness the…
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In the late summer of 1939, as Europe convulsed into war, two American physicists quietly published a paper that reshaped our understanding of the cosmos. On September 1—the very day German forces stormed into Poland—J. Robert Oppenheimer and his graduate student Hartland Snyder unveiled…
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The Adriatic port city of Ancona, perched on Italy’s eastern coast, stood in 1173 as one of the last bastions of independence against the encroaching power of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. Already scarred by repeated wars with imperial forces and their Lombard allies, Ancona’s…
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On the evening of August 31, 1939, as summer drew to a close in Europe, a strange broadcast crackled over the airwaves of a small German radio station near the Polish border. The message, supposedly issued by Polish saboteurs, declared that the station had…
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For nearly two years the men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition had been reduced to shadows of themselves, marooned at the frozen edge of the world. Their ship, Endurance, had been trapped and crushed by the pack ice of the Weddell Sea in late…
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In Boston on August 29, 1786, the Revolution was scarcely a decade old when its veterans once again took up arms—not against a king, but against their own courts. In western Massachusetts, angry farmers shut down the Northampton courthouse, muskets in hand, determined to…
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On August 28, 1879, British troops finally closed in on the fugitive monarch who had so recently commanded the fearsome Zulu army. King Cetshwayo kaMpande, last sovereign of an independent Zulu nation, was captured in the aftermath of one of the most brutal colonial…
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