First drunk driving arrest

English adventurer John Smith is elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia—the first permanent English settlement in North America. Smith, a colorful figure, had won popularity in the colony because of his organizational abilities and effectiveness in dealing with local Native American groups. In May 1607, about 100 English colonists settled along the James River in […]

Weeks behind schedule and the massive Sierra Nevada mountains still to be crossed, on what was likely September 10, 1846, the members of the ill-fated Donner Party realize they are running short of supplies and send two men ahead to California to bring back food. The group of 89 emigrants had begun their western trek […]

On September 10, 1921, Fatty Arbuckle, a silent-film era performer at the height of his fame, is arrested in San Francisco for the rape and murder of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle was later acquitted by a jury, but the scandal essentially put an end to his career. Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle was born on March […]

On September 10, 1960, Hurricane Donna hits the Florida Keys as a Category 4 storm. Having formed near Cape Verde off the African coast, it would go on to cause 150 deaths from Puerto Rico to New England over the course of two weeks. Donna first attained hurricane status on August 31 and headed west […]

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s monumental anti-war mural Guernica is received by Spain after four decades of refugee existence on September 10, 1981. One of Picasso’s most important works, the painting was inspired by the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazi air force during the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Picasso gave the […]

On September 10, 2008, scientists successfully flip the switch for the first time on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) lab in Geneva, kicking off what many called history’s biggest science experiment. Testing particle physics theories, the $8 billion LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world, […]