1973 – Billie Jean King beats Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tennis match at the Houston Astrodome.

1973 – Singer Jim Croce, songwriter and musician Maury Muehleisen and four others die when their light aircraft crashes shortly after takeoff from Natchitoches Regional Airport in Louisiana.

1988 – Margaret Thatcher delivers the Bruges speech, in which she articulates her opposition to further European integration.

2001 – In an address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, U.S. President George W. Bush declares a "war on terror".

2011 – The United States military ends its "don't ask, don't tell" policy, allowing gay men and women to serve openly for the first time.

2019 – Roughly four million people, mostly students, demonstrate across the world to address climate change. Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden leads the demonstration in New York City.

1778 – The Continental Congress passes the first United States federal budget.

1796 – George Washington's Farewell Address is printed across America as an open letter to the public.

1970 – Michael Eavis hosts the first Glastonbury Festival.

1982 – Scott Fahlman posts the first documented emoticons :-) and :-( on the Carnegie Mellon University bulletin board system.

1985 – Tipper Gore and other political wives form the Parents Music Resource Center as Frank Zappa, John Denver, and other musicians testify at U.S. Congressional hearings on obscenity in rock music.

1991 – Ötzi the Iceman is discovered in the Alps on the border between Italy and Austria.

2010 – The leaking oil well in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is sealed.

"America did not exile Chaplin for committing a crime. It exiled him for thinking outside the approved ideology."

1850 – The U.S. Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

1958 – The Bank of America introduces its first credit card, the BankAmericard (later renamed the VISA Card), in a test market in Fresno County, California.

1964 – The first television adaptation of Charles Addams's "The Addams Family" premieres on ABC Television.

1965 – Mel Brooks and Buck Henry's spy-comedy series Get Smart premieres on NBC Television.

1977 – Voyager I takes the first distant photograph of the Earth and the Moon together.

1997 – United States media magnate Ted Turner donates US$1 billion to the United Nations.

1787 – The United States Constitution is signed at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, bringing the Constitutional Convention to an end.

1849 – American abolitionist Harriet Tubman makes her first attempt to escape from slavery.

1991 – The first version of the Linux kernel (0.01) is released to the Internet.

2011 – Occupy Wall Street movement begins in Zuccotti Park, New York City.

1955 – A Soviet Zulu-class submarine becomes the first to launch a ballistic missile.

1966 – The Metropolitan Opera House opens at Lincoln Center in New York City with the world premiere of Samuel Barber's opera Antony and Cleopatra.

1987 – The Montreal Protocol is signed to protect the ozone layer from depletion.

Today we commemorate the martyrdom of Víctor Jara, who was brutally murdered by Pinochet's fascist thugs on September 16th, 1973. A communist musician who fought for and sung for the oppressed and everyone's right to live in peace - tortured and then executed for his contributions to the socialist movement in Chile. The stadium where he was killed now bears his name. Jara's revolutionary songs are still sung all over the world over half a century later. Music has always and will always be political.

1835 – HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, reaches the Galápagos Islands. The ship lands at Chatham or San Cristobal, the easternmost of the archipelago.

1954 – Marilyn Monroe's iconic skirt scene is shot during filming for The Seven Year Itch.

2008 – Lehman Brothers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

1741 – George Frideric Handel completes his oratorio Messiah.

1960 – The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded.

1994 – The rest of the Major League Baseball season is canceled because of a strike.

2000 – Microsoft releases Windows Me.

2015 – The first observation of gravitational waves is made, announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016.

1956 – The IBM 305 RAMAC is introduced, the first commercial computer to use disk storage.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

I stand corrected.

1933 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.

1938 – Adolf Hitler demands autonomy and self-determination for the Germans of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

1958 – Jack Kilby demonstrates the first working integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments.

1959 – Bonanza, the first regularly scheduled TV program presented in color, is launched in the United States.

1962 – US President John F. Kennedy delivers his "We choose to go to the Moon" speech at Rice University.

1977 – South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko dies in police custody.

2013 – NASA confirms that its Voyager 1 probe has become the first manmade object to enter interstellar space.

2001 - September 11 attacks, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that killed 2,977 people using four hijacked aircraft. Two aircraft crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, a third crashes into The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

2008 – The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland.

1776 – The Continental Congress officially names its union of states the United States.

1791 – Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, is named after President George Washington.

1839 – John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph.

1940 – George Stibitz pioneers the first remote operation of a computer.

1947 – First case of a computer bug being found: A moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University.

1956 – Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.

2016 – The government of North Korea conducts its fifth and reportedly biggest nuclear test. World leaders condemn the act, with South Korea calling it "maniacal recklessness".

1504 – Michelangelo's David is unveiled in Piazza della Signoria in Florence.

1892 – The Pledge of Allegiance is first recited.

1966 – The landmark American science fiction television series Star Trek premieres with its first-aired episode, "The Man Trap".

1971 – In Washington, D.C., the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is inaugurated, with the opening feature being the premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Mass.

1974 – Watergate scandal: US President Gerald Ford signs the pardon of Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office.

1927 – The first fully electronic television system is achieved by Philo Farnsworth.

1936 – The last thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial, dies alone in its cage at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania.

1979 – The Chrysler Corporation asks the United States government for US$1.5 billion to avoid bankruptcy.

2008 – The United States government takes control of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

1992 – A group of hunters at the Stampede trail near Healy, Alaska come across a male corpse in abandoned bus, later identified as Christopher McCandless.

1698 – In an effort to Westernize his nobility, Tsar Peter I of Russia imposes a tax on beards for all men except the clergy and peasantry.

1774 – First Continental Congress assembles in Philadelphia.

1793 – French Revolution: The French National Convention initiates the Reign of Terror.

1977 – Voyager Program: NASA launches the Voyager 1 spacecraft.