One week after winning a bloody victory over the Russian army at the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée enters the city of Moscow, only to find the population evacuated and the Russian army retreated again. Moscow was the goal of the invasion, but the deserted city held no czarist officials to sue for […]

During the Mexican-American War, U.S. forces under General Winfield Scott enter Mexico City and raise the American flag over the Hall of Montezuma, concluding a devastating advance that began with an amphibious landing at Vera Cruz six months earlier. The Mexican-American War began with a dispute over the U.S. government’s 1845 annexation of Texas. In […]

On September 14, 1927, dancer Isadora Duncan is strangled in Nice, France, when the enormous silk scarf she is wearing gets tangled in the rear hubcaps of her open car. (“Affectations,” said Gertrude Stein when she heard the news of Duncan’s death, “can be dangerous.”) Isadora Duncan was born in 1877 in San Francisco and […]

A Soviet rocket crashes into the moon’s surface, becoming the first man-made object sent from earth to reach the lunar surface. The event gave the Soviets a short-lived advantage in the “space race” and prompted even greater effort by the United States to develop its own space program. In 1957, the Soviets shocked the United […]

On September 14, 1964, the Kellogg’s Company begins selling the Pop-Tart. The innovative portable-breakfast-treat-turned-anytime-snack would go on to sell billions annually and help redefine the breakfast food market.  It all started when one of Kellogg’s biggest competitors, Post Consumer Brands, trumpeted to the press that it had created an innovative new breakfast item: a shelf-stable, […]

Elizabeth Ann Seton is canonized by Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in Rome, becoming one of the first American-born Catholic saints. Born in New York City in 1774, Elizabeth Bayley was the daughter of an Episcopalian physician. She devoted much of her time to charity work with the poor and in 1797 founded the […]

On September 14, 1982, Princess Grace of Monaco—the American-born former film star Grace Kelly, whose movie credits include The Country Girl and Rear Window—dies at the age of 52 from injuries suffered after her car plunged off a mountain road near Monte Carlo. During the height of her Hollywood career in the 1950s, Kelly became […]

With players on strike since mid-August, Major League Baseball on September 14, 1994, cancels its playoffs and World Series. This marks the first time since 1904 that a season will end without the crowning a champion. It also prematurely ends one of the sport’s most exciting seasons in recent memory. There were numerous reasons for […]

A 14-year-old Muslim boy is arrested at his high school in Irving, Texas after a digital clock he had reassembled at home using a pencil case was mistaken by his teacher as a bomb. Ahmed Mohamed, a freshman at the time, was questioned by police, detained and led in handcuffs to a juvenile detention center […]