THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― SEPTEMBER 14

September 14 is the 257th day of the year (258th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 108 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday (58 in 400 years each) than on Saturday or Sunday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Tuesday or Thursday (56).

NATIONAL CREAM FILLED DONUT DAY  

1321 – Dante Alighieri, Middle Age poet and "father of the Italian language", dies of malaria just hours after finishing writing Paradiso.

1752 – Britain (and American colonies) adopt the Gregorian calendar (no Sept 3-Sept 13th)

1812 – Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Russia reaches its climax as his Grande Armee enters Moscow–only to find the enemy capital deserted and burning, set afire by the few Russians who remained.

1868 – Golf's 1st recorded hole-in-one ("Old" Tom Morris at Prestwick's 8th hole)

1901 – On this day in 1901, U.S. President William McKinley dies after being shot by a deranged anarchist during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley won his first Congressional seat at the age of 34 and spent 14 years in the House, becoming known as the leading Republican expert on tariffs. After losing his seat in 1890, McKinley served two terms as governor of Ohio. By 1896, he had emerged as the leading Republican candidate for president, aided by the support of the wealthy Ohio industrialist Mark Hanna. That fall, McKinley defeated his Democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan, by the largest popular margin since the Civil War.

1901 – On this day in 1901, the 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt is elevated to the White House when President McKinley dies from an assassin's bullet. But while McKinley's untimely death brought Roosevelt the presidency, 17 years earlier two other deaths had sent the young Roosevelt fleeing to the far West where his political ambitions were almost forgotten.

1959 – A Soviet rocket crashes into the moon's surface, becoming the first man-made object sent from earth to reach the lunar surface. The event gave the Soviets a short-lived advantage in the "space race" and prompted even greater effort by the United States to develop its own space program. In 1957, the Soviets shocked the United States by becoming the first nation to launch a satellite into orbit around the earth. Sputnik, as it was called, frightened many Americans, who believed that the Soviets would soon develop an entire new class of weapons that could be fired from space. U.S. officials were especially concerned, for the success ofSputnik was a direct rebuke to American claims of technological and scientific superiority over the communist regime in Russia. It was a tremendous propaganda victory for the Soviets, and gave them an edge in attracting less-developed nations into the Soviet orbit with promises of technological aid and assistance.


1930 – Germans elected (National Socialists) Nazi Party to office making them the second largest political party in Germany.


1968 – First broadcast of "60 Minutes" on CBS-TV. Who knew?

1975 – Mother Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton canonized as 1st US-born saint by Pope Paul VI. She established the first Catholic school in the nation, at Emmitsburg, Maryland, where she founded the first American congregation of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity.


1994 – The 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike was the eighth work stoppage in baseball history, as well as the fourth in-season work stoppage in 22 years. The strike began on August 12, 1994 and resulted in the remainder of that season being cancelled, including the postseason and, for the first time since 1904, the World Series. The strike was broken on April 2, 1995 after 232 days, making it the longest such stoppage in MLB history and breaking the record that the 1981 strike set. 948 games were cancelled in all, and MLB became the first major professional sports league to lose an entire postseason due to a work stoppage (the National Hockey League, which lost its entire 2004-05 season to a lockout, is the other). Due to the strike, both the 1994 and 1995 seasons were not played to a complete 162 games; the strike was called after most teams had played at least 113 games in 1994 and each team played 144 games in 1995.

2001 – Historic National Prayer Service held at Washington National Cathedral for victims of the September 11 attacks. A similar service is held in Canada on Parliament Hill, the largest vigil ever held in the nation's capital.


2015 – The first observation of gravitational waves was made, announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016. The possibility of gravitational waves was discussed in 1893 by Oliver Heaviside using the analogy between the inverse-square law in gravitation and electricity. In 1905 Henri Poincaré first proposed gravitational waves (ondes gravifiques) emanating from a body and propagating at the speed of light as being required by the Lorentz transformations. Predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein on the basis of his theory of general relativity, gravitational waves transport energy as gravitational radiation, a form of radiant energy similar to electromagnetic radiation.

TODAY'S BIRTHS

1769 – Alexander von Humboldt, German geographer and explorer (d. 1859)

1879 – Margaret Sanger, American nurse and activist, and eugenecist (d. 1966)

1902 – Alice Tully, American soprano and philanthropist (d. 1993)

1941 – Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, American civil rights activist

From Wikipedia and Google, except as noted.