Category: Today

On September 20, 480 BC, Greeks defeated Persian forces in the battle of Salamis.

On September 19, 1778, the Continental Congress passed the first budget of the United States.

Congress last passed a budget in 1997.

On September 18, 1793, George Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol building.

It has grown, since.

On September 18, 1838, Richard Cobden established the Anti-Corn Law League, which proceeded to bring free trade to Britain.

On September 17, 1787, the Constitution of the United States was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1849 on this same day in September, Harriet Tubman escaped to freedom in Philadelphia, but soon returned to Maryland to rescue her family. She made at least 13 trips into the slave-owning South to liberate more than 70 slaves before the Civil War (in which she served as a spy for the North).

September 16 marks the Independence Days for Mexico (celebrating the declaration of independence from Spain in 1810) and Papua New Guinea (commemorating the exit from Australia in 1975).

On September 15, 1820, an uprising occurred in Lisbon, Portugal, following similar insurrection in Porto the previous month. This was no bloodthirsty mob, but, instead, a popular demand for constitutional government. Unfortunately, the country was beset with imperial and monarchical problems for some time to come.

The United Nations established September 15 as International Day of Democracy, in 2007. An Independence Day is celebrated on this date in Guatemala (a Patriotic Day), El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, commemorating independence from Spain in 1821.

In 1752, throughout the British Empire, September 2 was followed, the next day, by September 14, as the government adopted the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days.

On September 14, 1944, Maastricht becomes the first Dutch city to be liberated by allied forces.

John Calvin [pictured above] returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American civilization, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.

On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.

On September 12, 1848, Switzerland became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.

In 1880 on this date, H.L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.

September 11 marks several dates in the history of the clash between the West and the Islamic East:

• In 1526, the Ottoman army occupied Buda after the crushing Hungarian defeat in the Battle of Mohács.

• In 1565, Ottoman forces retreated from Malta, ending the Great Siege of Malta.

• In 1609, an expulsion order announced against the Moriscos of Valencia began the expulsion of all Spain’s Moors.

• In 2001, Muslim jihadists associated with Al Qaida hijacked two airliners flying out of Boston, Massachusetts, one out of Newark, N.J., and another out of Washington’s Dulles airport, commandeering two of those jets into the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon near the nation’s capital. The fourth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — making this flight, United 93, the only one of the terrorist attacks that day prevented from achieving its target, the agency of the prevention being the united efforts of civilians on the flight.