Today In History
September 11 in History
Your birthday shares the stage with stories that shaped the world.
9/11: Terrorists Fly Planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon
Five hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., triggering a chain reaction that destroyed the World Trade Center complex by noon. Passengers on United Flight 93 fought back against their hijackers, bringing the plane down in Pennsylvania and saving the Capitol or White House from destruction. The attacks grounded all U.S. aircraft within hours and sparked three days of international flight bans, instantly overhauling global security protocols.
Famous Birthdays
Ludacris Born: Atlanta's Rap Powerhouse Arrives
Ludacris rose from Atlanta radio DJ to multi-platinum rapper and Hollywood actor, anchoring the Southern hip-hop explosion of the early 2000s with a rapid-fire delivery and sharp comedic wordplay. His label Disturbing tha Peace launched multiple careers, while his role in the Fast and Furious franchise cemented his crossover appeal to a global audience.
Julian Byng
He commanded the assault on Vimy Ridge in April 1917 — four Canadian divisions taking in four hours what the French and British had failed to take in two years. Julian Byng planned it with unusual precision: soldiers rehearsed on taped-out replicas of the terrain, artillery creeping ahead of them by 100 yards every three minutes. It worked. Canada lost 3,598 men taking it. Byng later became Governor General of Canada, then triggered a constitutional crisis in 1926 by refusing a prime minister's request to dissolve parliament. The general who won Vimy nearly broke Canadian democracy.
Victor Wooten
He plays bass with his thumb in a way that shouldn't produce the sounds it produces. Victor Wooten, born 1964, has won five Grammy Awards with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and is widely considered the most technically advanced bassist alive — a claim that's hard to dispute when you watch him play solo pieces that sound like three people performing simultaneously. He also runs a music camp in Tennessee focused on the connection between playing and listening. He left students who listen differently.
Bashar al-Assad
He trained as an ophthalmologist in London and was preparing to continue his studies when his brother died in a car crash in 1994 and the family's political expectations redirected. Bashar al-Assad returned to Syria, joined the military, and inherited the presidency in 2000 after his father's death. Early reformers called the first year the 'Damascus Spring.' It lasted about 18 months. He then governed for another two decades through civil war, chemical weapons allegations, and the displacement of half his country's population. The eye doctor who became the regime.
Moby
He grew up in the South Bronx, became a vegan animal rights activist, and made one of the best-selling electronic albums of the 1990s by sampling everything from a Bessie Smith vocal to a Porgy and Bess recording. Moby, born 1965, licensed every track on 'Play' to films and advertisements — which critics called selling out and which introduced 10 million people to a blues singer who'd been dead for 60 years. He left an album that simultaneously annoyed purists and did exactly what music is supposed to do.
Mark Klepaski
He played bass on Breaking Benjamin's biggest records — 'We Are Not Alone' and 'Phobia' — during the period when the band sold millions of albums off rock radio and heavy rotation on MTV. Mark Klepaski, born 1975, was part of the rhythm section that gave Breaking Benjamin their low-end weight during their commercial peak. He left his fingerprints on records that a very specific kind of mid-2000s teenager played at a volume that upset their parents.
Carl Zeiss
He started as an apprentice to a court mechanic and spent years making microscopes in a single-room workshop in Jena before anyone noticed. Carl Zeiss partnered with physicist Ernst Abbe in 1866, and together they replaced guesswork lens-grinding with mathematical precision — building optics to calculated specifications for the first time. His lenses ended up in microscopes that helped identify cholera and tuberculosis. He left behind a company that still manufactures the optics used in LASIK surgery and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Pinto Colvig
Vance "Pinto" Colvig gave voice to the laughter of generations as the original Goofy and the dual personalities of Grumpy and Sleepy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Beyond his vocal performances, he pioneered the character of Bozo the Clown, establishing the template for the modern television circus host that dominated children's programming for decades.
Ferdinand Marcos
He declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972, citing a communist threat, and then governed by decree for the next nine years — while his wife Imelda accumulated 3,000 pairs of shoes and a collection of Michelangelos. Ferdinand Marcos fled in 1986 after a people-power uprising, airlifted out by the US military with crates of cash, gold certificates, and those shoes left behind. He died in Hawaiian exile. The Philippine government spent decades trying to recover an estimated $10 billion in stolen assets.
Nông Đức Mạnh
Nông Đức Mạnh rose from a rural upbringing in the northern highlands to become the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. His decade-long tenure oversaw Vietnam’s rapid economic integration into the global market and the formalization of private property rights, shifting the nation away from its strictly agrarian, state-controlled roots toward a modern industrial economy.
Robert Palmer
Robert Palmer transformed the semiconductor industry by co-founding Mostek, a company that pioneered the mass production of dynamic random-access memory chips. His technical leadership helped drive the rapid miniaturization of computing power, directly enabling the transition from room-sized mainframes to the personal computers that define the modern digital landscape.
Mickey Hart
Mickey Hart expanded the sonic vocabulary of rock by integrating global percussion traditions into the Grateful Dead’s improvisational framework. His obsession with ethnomusicology led him to archive endangered musical cultures worldwide, ensuring that rare rhythmic patterns survived for future generations. Through his work, he transformed the drum kit from a timekeeping tool into a vehicle for complex, polyrhythmic storytelling.
Historical Events
Charles XII of Sweden halts his advance on Moscow at Smolensk, a decision that leaves his exhausted army vulnerable to defeat at the Battle of Poltava just nine months later. This strategic blunder shatters the Swedish Empire's dominance and forces it to relinquish its status as a major European power.
General Augusto Pinochet leads a CIA-backed coup to topple democratically elected President Salvador Allende, plunging Chile into seventeen years of military dictatorship. This brutal regime dismantled labor unions and banned political parties, fundamentally altering the nation's social fabric and leaving a legacy of human rights abuses that Chileans still grapple with today.
Pete Rose smashed through Ty Cobb's sixty-year barrier with his 4,192nd career base hit to claim the all-time record. This feat instantly cemented a legacy of durability that defined an era of baseball, even as it later sparked a lifetime ban for gambling violations.
Five hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., triggering a chain reaction that destroyed the World Trade Center complex by noon. Passengers on United Flight 93 fought back against their hijackers, bringing the plane down in Pennsylvania and saving the Capitol or White House from destruction. The attacks grounded all U.S. aircraft within hours and sparked three days of international flight bans, instantly overhauling global security protocols.
Three Roman legions vanish into the Germanic woods, shattering Augustus's dream of a unified empire east of the Rhine. This catastrophic defeat compels Rome to abandon its conquests beyond the river, establishing the frontier that will define European borders for four centuries.
Isaac II Angelos killed the tyrant Andronikos I's chief enforcer Stephen Hagiochristophorites and rallied the citizens of Constantinople into open revolt. The uprising toppled the despised Andronikos and placed Isaac on the Byzantine throne, though his ineffective rule would accelerate the empire's decline toward the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade.
Before 1226, the Eucharist was kept in locked tabernacles — venerated privately, not displayed publicly in parishes. King Louis VIII of France requested the practice be opened to ordinary congregations during a military campaign, wanting his troops to pray before the exposed sacrament. A local bishop granted it; Pope Honorius III extended the permission broadly. A battlefield request from a French king quietly became one of Roman Catholicism's most enduring devotional practices, now observed in parishes worldwide every week.
William Wallace and Andrew Moray exploited a narrow bridge crossing to annihilate a larger English force, drowning and slaughtering thousands of soldiers as they funneled across the River Forth. The decisive victory shattered the myth of English military invincibility in Scotland and transformed Wallace into the symbol of Scottish resistance for generations.
Spain's Moriscos were Christians — or at least baptized ones. Converted descendants of Muslims who'd been forced to choose between faith and expulsion a century earlier, they'd built lives, businesses, and families across Valencia and Aragon. Philip III expelled roughly 300,000 of them between 1609 and 1614. Valencian landowners immediately protested: Morisco tenant farmers had been running their estates. The agricultural economy of eastern Spain collapsed for decades. A decision framed as religious purity turned out to be an economic catastrophe.
Cromwell's New Model Army stormed Drogheda after the garrison refused to surrender, massacring approximately 3,500 soldiers and civilians in a deliberate act of terror. Cromwell justified the slaughter as God's righteous judgment, but the atrocity became the most enduring symbol of English brutality in Ireland and poisoned Anglo-Irish relations for centuries.
Polish King John III Sobieski leads a coalition charge with his winged Hussars to break the Ottoman siege of Vienna. This decisive victory halts centuries of Ottoman expansion into Central Europe and secures Habsburg dominance for generations.
Prince Eugene of Savoy's forces annihilated the Ottoman army at Zenta, shattering their power in Europe. This crushing defeat forced the Sublime Porte to sign the Treaty of Karlowitz, ending centuries of Ottoman expansion into Central Europe and securing Habsburg dominance for generations.
Barcelona had been holding out for over a year — after most of Catalonia had already fallen to the Bourbon forces of Philip V. The city fought block by block and ran out of time on September 11, 1714. Casualties among the defenders were catastrophic. Philip V abolished Catalan institutions immediately afterward, banned the Catalan language from official use, and demolished a section of the city to build a military fortress to watch over the population. September 11 is now Catalonia's national day.
Benjamin Franklin was 67 years old, living in London, and absolutely furious with Parliament when he sat down and wrote this. The essay listed 20 precise rules for destroying an empire — tax the colonies arbitrarily, insult their assemblies, quarter troops in their homes. Savage, funny, and ignored. The Public Advertiser ran it without his name attached. Two years later, the muskets came out. Franklin had basically published the blueprint for what was about to happen.
Washington had 11,000 men and a plan. The plan fell apart by noon. British General Howe sent a flanking column 17 miles around the American right — a move Washington's scouts missed entirely — and hit them from a direction nobody expected. The Continental Army lost roughly 1,300 men killed, wounded, or captured. Philadelphia fell eleven days later. And yet Washington kept the army intact, which turned out to matter far more than the battle he just lost.
Fun Facts
Zodiac Sign
Virgo
Aug 23 -- Sep 22
Earth sign. Analytical, kind, and hardworking.
Birthstone
Sapphire
Blue
Symbolizes truth, sincerity, and faithfulness.
Next Birthday
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days until September 11
Quote of the Day
“If only we could have two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, which seem as if they have to be made; and the second in which to profit by them.”
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