September 28 in History

Alexander Fleming returned to his messy London lab to find a staphylococci culture wiped out by a stray Penicillium mold, sparking an accidental revolution in medicine. This discovery launched the era of antibiotics, turning once-fatal infections into treatable conditions and saving countless lives worldwide.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to carve up Poland between them before launching their invasions in September 1939. This agreement enabled both dictatorships to seize territory without immediate conflict, setting the stage for the brutal partition that erased Polish sovereignty and ignited World War II across Europe.

King Ptolemy of Egypt ordered Pompey the Great's assassination as soon as the Roman general landed, hoping to win Caesar's favor. This brutal betrayal instead drove Caesar into a full-scale civil war across Egypt, driving him to seize Alexandria and install Cleopatra as ruler.

Parliament passed the Misuse of Drugs Act, banning the medicinal use of cannabis and establishing the classification system that would govern British drug policy for the next half-century. The law consolidated scattered regulations into a single punitive framework that criminalized possession and supply, shaping the UK's approach to drug enforcement through decades of subsequent debate over decriminalization.

Ariel Sharon walked onto the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem surrounded by over a thousand police officers, a visit Palestinians viewed as a deliberate provocation at one of Islam's holiest sites. The resulting riots escalated within days into the Second Intifada, a five-year cycle of violence that killed thousands and destroyed the Oslo peace process.

Pierre Trudeau died at 80, leaving behind a Canada fundamentally reshaped by his patriation of the Constitution and enshrinement of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. His combative defense of federalism during the Quebec sovereignty crisis and his creation of official bilingualism defined modern Canadian national identity for an entire generation.

Peres served in every major role in Israeli government across seven decades — defense minister, finance minister, foreign minister, prime minister twice, president — and he never stopped believing in something most Israelis had stopped believing in. He was 70 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for the Oslo Accords he'd helped negotiate. He was 93 when he died, still arguing for a two-state solution that the parties on both sides had effectively abandoned. His critics said he was naive. His defenders said he understood something about the alternative. He'd built Israel's nuclear weapons program in the 1950s and then spent the next sixty years trying to make weapons unnecessary. Both were sincere.

The Slavník dynasty had been one of the most powerful Bohemian noble families for generations — rivals of the Přemyslids for control of Bohemia. In 995, while most of the Slavník men were away on a military campaign in Poland, Boleslaus II sent forces to their stronghold and killed the four brothers who'd stayed behind: Spytimír, Pobraslav, Pořej, and Čáslav. It effectively ended the dynasty as a political force. One Slavník escaped — Vojtěch, who'd already left for missionary work. He's now venerated as Saint Adalbert, patron saint of Bohemia.

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into what's now San Diego Bay in 1542 and called it 'closed and very good' — precise words from a precise navigator who knew a harbor when he saw one. He was working for the Spanish Crown, looking for a Northwest Passage and mythical cities of gold, and found neither. He died a few months later on San Miguel Island after an injury. But his log described the California coast in enough detail that Spain knew what it had — and didn't seriously colonize it for another 227 years.