Sept. 17 historic events
1630 The city of Boston, Massachusetts is founded.
1683 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to the Royal Society describing “animalcules”: the first known description of protozoa.
1787 The United States Constitution is signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1814 Francis Scott Key finishes his poem The Star-Spangled Banner.
1862 American Civil War: George B. McClellan’s Union forces halt the northward drive of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army’s invasion of Maryland in the single-day Battle of Antietam. With 23,100 killed, wounded or captured, it remains the bloodiest day in U.S. military history.
1908 The Wright Flyer flown by Orville Wright, with Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge as passenger, crashes killing Selfridge. He becomes the first airplane fatality.
[more than any other WWI pilot], and was the leader of the feared “Flying Circus”. His less-well-known brother Lothar was also an ace with 40 shoot-downs credited.)
1939 World War II: The Soviet Union joins Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland during the Polish Defensive War of 1939.
1944 World War II: Allied Airborne troops parachute into the Netherlands as the “Market” half of Operation Market Garden. (This unsuccessful attempt at ending WWII earlier than it did was detailed in the bestseller “A Bridge Too Far”.)
1948 The Lehi (also known as the Stern gang) assassinates Count Folke Bernadotte, who was appointed by the UN to mediate between the Arabs and Jews.
1970 Fighting breaks out along the Syria-Jordanian border between Jordanian troops and the fedayeen. (This was the “Black September” that the terrorist group named themselves after.)
1976 The first Space Shuttle, Enterprise, is unveiled by NASA.
1978 The Camp David Accords are signed by Israel and Egypt.
1980 After weeks of strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gda?sk, Poland, the nationwide independent trade union Solidarity is established.
1991 The first version of the Linux kernel (0.01) is released to the Internet.
1992 Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh called a halt to his five-and-a-half-year probe of the Iran-Contra scandal.
1999 President Bill Clinton lifted restrictions on trade, travel and banking imposed on North Korea a half-century earlier. (North Korea won all sorts of goodies by promising to halt development on nuclear weapons. As we now know, reaped the rewards of those deals, while all the while they lied their heads off. They test detonated nuclear weapons beginning in 2006. Former U.S. President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, largely for his part in the nuclear negotiations with North Korea. Oops.)
2001 The New York Stock Exchange reopens for trading after the September 11 attacks, the longest closure since the Great Depression.
2004 Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for the Sept. 1-3 school siege in Beslan and other terrorist attacks in Russia that claimed more than 430 lives. (Thereby proving that Islamic terror and its accompanying inhuman cruelty cross ethnic and racial lines.)
2004 San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds hit his 700th career home run, joining Babe Ruth (714) and Hank Aaron (755) as the only players to reach the milestone. (Whoever said that cheaters never prosper?)
2007 AOL, once the largest ISP in the U.S., officially announces plans to refocus the company as an advertising business and to relocate its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Virginia to New York, New York.