On September 27, 1822, Jean-François Champollion, the brilliant and tireless French philologist, stood before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and announced what scholars had dreamed of for centuries: the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script had at last been deciphered. His declaration, brief and…
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On this day in 1933, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, one of America’s most notorious gangsters, surrendered to federal agents in Memphis and gave the FBI its enduring nickname. Surrounded and with no way out, Kelly raised his hands and cried: “Don’t shoot, G-Men!” The…
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On September 25, 2018, Bill Cosby was sentenced to three to ten years in a Pennsylvania state prison for aggravated sexual assault—a stunning reversal for a once-revered entertainer who built his persona as America’s avuncular moralist. The punishment closed a protracted legal saga arising…
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President Dwight D. Eisenhower took the extraordinary step of ordering federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, today, deploying the 101st Airborne Division to enforce desegregation at Central High School. The move marked one of the most dramatic assertions of federal authority over states’ rights…
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In the autumn of 1952, a young California senator named Richard Nixon faced a political crisis that might have ended his career before it truly began. Selected just weeks earlier by General Dwight D. Eisenhower as his running mate on the Republican ticket, Nixon…
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On the gray morning in occupied New York City, a 21-year-old Connecticut schoolteacher turned Continental officer met his end at the hands of the British. Nathan Hale, captured while attempting to gather intelligence behind enemy lines, was hanged as a spy on September 22,…
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Rush-hour traffic on Massachusetts Avenue was just beginning to thicken when a thunderous blast tore through Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C. on September 21, 1976. A car carrying Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador and outspoken critic of General Augusto Pinochet’s military regime, erupted…
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During September 1780, one of America’s earliest heroes turned traitor. Benedict Arnold’s treason stands as one of the most infamous acts of betrayal in American history, forever etched in the annals of the American Revolutionary War. Arnold, a prominent military leader in the Continental…
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On September 19, 1944, the United States Army entered a dense, forbidding tract of woodland along the German–Belgian border known as the Hürtgen Forest. What began that morning as a push to clear the area for the advance into the Rhineland would spiral into…
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On September 18, 1850, the United States Congress passed and President Millard Fillmore signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, one of the most divisive and consequential pieces of legislation in American history. As part of the Compromise of 1850—a fragile political…
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