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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The 1972 Munich Olympics were meant to symbolize renewal. West Germany, scarred by its Nazi past, sought to project a liberal, cosmopolitan image to the world: “the Games of peace.” Instead, Munich became synonymous with massacre. Over the days of September 5 and 6,…
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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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