On September 9, 1828, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. Known most commonly in the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy, he became the celebrated author of the novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as well as the novellas and short stories entitled “Family Happiness,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.”
His political and religious ideas heavily influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Tolstoy died in 1910.
On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.
On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.
On September 7, 2008, the U.S. Government “took control” of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of these had been created by Congress as part of a concerted plan to make home ownership easier, and both had gotten completely out of hand during the many years of their existence, especially under new rules established by politicians in the 1990s. The after-market that they helped create — the packaged mortgage market — was what imploded in 2007–2008, leading to the economic slump that Nicholas Nassim Taleb referred to as setting the U.S. government on President Obama’s economic policy course of “eight years of Novocain.”
On September 6, 1843, Yves Guyot was born. A journalist, economist, and political activist, he once endured a six-month prison term for his campaign against the prefecture of police. He served as minister of public works under the premiership of P.E. Tirard in 1889, retaining his portfolio in the cabinet of Charles de Freycinet until 1892. A free-trade liberal, he lost his seat in the election of 1893 owing to his militant attitude against socialism. His many books included The Principles of Social Economy (1892), The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), The Comedy of Protection (1906), Socialistic Fallacies (1910), and Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914). He served as editor of Journal des Économistes, following the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari.
Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840-1885).
Responding to British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. Virginian Peyton Randolph (pictured) was appointed as the first president of Congress. John Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay and George Washington were among the delegates.
Odoacer, a German “barbarian,” ousted Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, thus ending that empire on September 4, 476 A.D.
Many common people did not notice a change.