In a letter to his nephew, Lund Washington, plantation manager of Mount Vernon, General George Washington writes on September 30, 1776, of his displeasure with the undisciplined conduct and poor battlefield performance of the American militia. Washington blamed the Patriot reliance on the militia as the chief root of his problems in the devastating loss […]

The first volume of Louisa May Alcott’s book Little Women is published on September 30, 1868. The novel will become Alcott’s first bestseller and a beloved children’s classic. Like the fictional Jo March, Alcott was the second of four daughters. She was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of her life in Concord, Massachusetts, where […]

On September 30, 1918, a combined Arab and Australian force arrives in Damascus, Syria, to spearhead its liberation from the Turks during World War I, before British troops arrive the following morning to seal the deal. An instrumental commander in the Allied campaign was T.E. Lawrence, a legendary British soldier known as Lawrence of Arabia. […]

On September 30, 1927, Babe Ruth hits his 60th home run of the 1927 season and with it sets a record that would stand for 34 years. George Herman Ruth was born February 6, 1895, in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the first of eight children, but only he and a sister survived infancy. Ruth’s father […]

British and French prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier sign the Munich Pact with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The agreement averted the outbreak of war but gave Czechoslovakia away to German conquest. In the spring of 1938, Hitler began openly to support the demands of German-speakers living in the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia for […]

After 15 months and more than 250,000 flights, the Berlin Airlift officially comes to an end. The airlift was one of the greatest logistical feats in modern history and was one of the crucial events of the early Cold War. In June 1948, the Soviet Union suddenly blocked all ground traffic into West Berlin, which […]

The USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, is commissioned by the U.S. Navy. In August 1958, it accomplished the first voyage under the geographic North Pole. The Nautilus was decommissioned on March 3, 1980.

In Oxford, Mississippi, James H. Meredith, an African American student, is escorted onto the University of Mississippi campus by U.S. Marshals, setting off a deadly riot. Two men were killed before the violence was quelled by more than 3,000 federal soldiers. The next day, Meredith successfully enrolled and began to attend classes amid continuing disruption. […]