A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on September 10th.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On either August 20 or September 8-10, 480 BC, the Persians defeated the Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae. On September 10, 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was stabbed in the chest by assassin Luigi Lucheni. On September 10, 1939, with its torpedoing of its own submarine, the HMS Oxley, the British Royal Navy proved quite early in World War II that…

A Brief History On September 10, 1977, Tunisian French landscaper and pimp, Hamida Djandoubi, became the last person executed by guillotine in France, and the last person executed for a crime in Western Europe. Digging Deeper As the civilized world moved away from the death penalty, a furious debate about capital punishment has raged, with nearly half of the United States abolishing it altogether.  Today, 27 states, the Federal government, and American Samoa retain capital punishment as a potential sentence, while in Europe only Belarus and Russia retain capital punishment. American neighbors Canada and Mexico have abolished the death penalty,…

A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on September 9th.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On September 9, 9 A.D., Germanic tribes under the leadership of Arminius dealt an army of three Roman Legions and their auxiliaries a crushing and total defeat at Teutoburg Forest in what is now Germany. On September 9, 337, almost four months after the death of Emperor Constantine the Great, his three sons inherited the throne as co-emperors, a situation that seems unworkable.…

A Brief History On September 9, 1972, an exploration team mapping the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky discovered that the Mammoth Cave system was linked to the Flint Ridge cave network, making it the longest cave passageway in the world. Digging Deeper Upon the discovery by the Cave Research Foundation team, the entire cave system is now known as the Mammoth–Flint Ridge Cave System.  In fact, the Flint Ridge portion is even longer than the part previously just called Mammoth Cave. A 52,830-acre National Park since 1941, the caves boast over 426 miles of surveyed passages, one and a half…

A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on September 8th.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On either August 20 or September 8-10, 480 BC, the Persians defeated the Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae. On September 8, 1761, King George III of the United Kingdom married Duchess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (Germany today, what was then the Holy Roman Empire). On September 8, 1923, the biggest peacetime disaster in U.S. Navy history occurred when commodore Captain Edward Watson…