Elvis Presley makes first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”

Though it had only been a part of the United States for less than two years, California becomes the 31st state in the union (without ever even having been a territory) on September 9, 1850. Mexico had reluctantly ceded California and much of its northern territory to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of […]

The infamous Boston Police Strike of 1919 begins, causing an uproar around the nation and confirming the growing influence of unions on American life.  As society changed in the 20th century, police were expected to act more professionally. Some of their previous practices were no longer countenanced. Explanations such as that later given by the […]

On September 9, 1942, a Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on an Oregon state forest—the first air attack on the U.S. mainland in the war. Launching from the Japanese sub I-25, Nobuo Fujita piloted his light aircraft over the state of Oregon and firebombed Mount Emily, alighting a state forest. The president immediately called for […]

Funeral services, attended by 250,000 mourners, are held for Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square. Among those in attendance were Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, Chinese Vice-Premier Li Hsien-nien and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. Ho had established the Indochinese Communist Party in 1929. In September 1945, as the defeated Japanese prepared to leave […]

Mao Zedong, who led the Chinese people through a long revolution and then ruled the nation’s communist government from its establishment in 1949, dies. Along with V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao was one of the most significant communist figures of the Cold War. Mao was born in China in 1893. During the 1910s, he […]

On September 9, 2007, the NFL catches the New England Patriots illegally videotaping coaching signals of the New York Jets from an unauthorized location in a Week 1 game in East Rutherford, N.J.—a scandal the media soon dubs “Spygate.”  Just before halftime of the Patriots’ 38-14 Patriots win, a 26-year-old New England video assistant named […]