Sam Houston elected as president of Texas

In response to the British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convenes at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia. Fifty-six delegates from all the colonies except Georgia drafted a declaration of rights and grievances and elected Virginian Peyton Randolph as the first president of Congress. Patrick […]

Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse is fatally bayoneted by a U.S. soldier after resisting confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. A year earlier, Crazy Horse was among the Sioux leaders who defeated George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana Territory. The battle, in which 265 members of the […]

On September 5, 1957, New York Times writer Gilbert Millstein gives a rave review to On the Road, the second novel (hardly anyone had read the first) by a 35-year-old Columbia University dropout named Jack Kerouac. “Jack went to bed obscure,” Kerouac’s girlfriend told a reporter, “and woke up famous.” On the Road is an […]

On September 5, 1970, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces initiate Operation Jefferson Glen. It marked one of the last major large-scale military operations for U.S. ground forces during the Vietnam War.

September 5, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford survives an attempt on his life in Sacramento, California. The assailant, a petite, red haired, freckle-faced young woman named Lynette Fromme, approached the president while he was walking near the California Capitol and raised a .45 caliber handgun toward him. Before she was able to fire off a […]

On September 5, 2006, Katie Couric makes headlines—and TV history—with her highly publicized debut as the first female solo anchor of a weekday network evening news broadcast, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Couric, who served as co-anchor of The Today Show from 1991 to 2006, replaced Dan Rather, who anchored CBS Evening News from […]