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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On September 17, 1862, the rolling fields and cornrows along Antietam Creek bore witness to the single bloodiest day in American military history. George B. McClellan’s Union Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia clashed in a desperate struggle…
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On September 16, 1776, the morning broke with British horns sounding not the call to arms, but the mockery of a fox-hunt. From the wooded ridges above Harlem, George Washington’s battered Continentals listened to the taunt. For weeks they had known only retreat —…
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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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