President William McKinley is shot

One of Ferdinand Magellan’s five ships—the Victoria—arrives at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the world. The Victoria was commanded by Basque navigator Juan Sebastian de Elcano, who took charge of the vessel after Magellan was killed in the Philippines in April 1521. During a long, hard journey home, the people on […]

On September 6, 1847, writer Henry David Thoreau moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts, after living for two years in a shack he built himself on Walden Pond. Thoreau graduated from Harvard and started a school with his brother. But in 1839, he decided while on a canoe trip […]

South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd is stabbed to death by a messenger during a parliamentary meeting in Cape Town. The assailant, Demetrio Tsafendas, was a Mozambique immigrant of mixed racial descent—part Greek and part Swazi. As minister of native affairs and later as South African leader, Verwoerd oversaw the introduction and application of South […]

On September 6, 1975, 18-year-old rising tennis star Martina Navratilova—who would  become one of the greatest players of all time—asks for political asylum in the United States after defecting from communist Czechoslovakia. Navratilova flourished on the court between May and September 1975, finishing runner-up in the Australian and French Open. At the U.S. Open, Navratilova […]

On September 6, 1997, an estimated 2.5 billion people around the globe tune in to television broadcasts of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died at the age of 36 in a car crash in Paris the week before. During her 15-year marriage to Prince Charles, the son of Queen Elizabeth II and […]