The guillotine falls silent

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, 1919, almost one year after an armistice officially ended the First World War, New York City holds a parade to welcome home General John J. Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), and some 25,000 soldiers who had served in the AEF’s 1st Division on the Western Front. The […]

In light of the destruction and terror inflicted on Londoners by a succession of German bombing raids, called “the Blitz,” the British War Cabinet seeks retaliation, instructing British bombers over Germany to drop their bombs “anywhere” if unable to reach their targets. The prior two nights of bombing had wrought extraordinary damage, especially in the […]

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, […]