In Calendar Form

September 28

55BC Birth: Teacher and philosopher Confucius. He dedicated most of his life to teaching, starting at the age of 22 when he will open his first school.

0855 Death: Emperor Lothar, in Gaul; his kingdom is divided between his three sons.

1066 William, Duke of Normandy, soon to be known as William the Conqueror invades England and claims the throne.

1106 King Henry of England defeats his brother Robert at the Battle of Tinchebrai and reunites England and Normandy.

1238 James of Aragon retakes Valencia, Spain, from the Arabs.

1542 Portuguese explorer Juan Rodrguez Cabrillo sails into present-day San Diego Bay during the course of his explorations of the northwest shores of Mexico on behalf of Spain. It is the first known European encounter with California. At San Diego, Cabrillo lands at Point Loma Head, now part of the Cabrillo National Monument. He then sails on to explore much of the rest of the California coast. During one landing, he breaks his leg and apparently falls sick with complications from the injury.

He dies in January 1543, probably on San Miguel Island off the Santa Barbara coast. Despite his reports of the appealing California coastline, the first Spanish settlement is not established in California until 1769, when Father Junpero Serra founds his mission at San Diego.

1573 Birth: Caravaggio, in Italy, painter.

1607 Samuel de Champlain and his colonists return to France from Port Royal Nova Scotia.

1687 The Turks surrender Athens to the Venetians.

1704 A statute is enacted by the bizarre colony of Maryland, giving ministers the right to impose divorce on "unholy couples."

1781 US Revolutionary War: American forces begin the siege on Yorktown Heights, VA.

1787 The US Congress votes to send the new Constitution of the United States to the state legislatures for their approval.

1794 The Anglo-Russian-Austrian Alliance of St. Petersburg, which is directed against France, is signed.

1820 Birth: Fredrich Engels, socialist who will collaborate with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

1829 Walker's Appeal, a racial antislavery pamphlet, is published in Boston.

1833 Death: Lemuel Haynes, revolutionary War veteran, at 88.

1839 Birth: Frances Willard, founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

1841 Birth: Georges Clemenceau, in France, premier of France during WW1, will defend Alfred Dreyfus.

1850 Flogging in the US Navy and on merchant vessels is abolished.

1850 Mormon leader Brigham Young is named the first governor of the territory of Utah by US President Millard Fillmore. In 1847, Young led an exodus of persecuted Mormons seeking religious freedom from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Utah's Valley of the Great Salt Lake. In 1857, President James Buchanan removed Young, a polygamist with over twenty wives, from the position of governor, and sent US Army troops to Utah to establish federal law. Tensions between the territory of Utah and the federal government continued until Wilford Woodruff, president of the Mormon church, issued his "Manifesto" in 1890, renouncing the traditional practice of polygamy, and reducing the domination of the church over Utah's political, economic, and social life. In 1896, Utah will be accepted into the United States as the forty-fifth state.

1852 Birth: Henri Moissan, in France, chemist; will isolate fluorine (Nobel 1906).

1856 Birth: Edward Thompson, US archeologist who will explore Mayan ruins.

1858 Donati's comet becomes the first to be photographed.

1864 US Civil War: Union General William Rosecrans blames his defeat at Chickamauga on two of his subordinate generals, though they are later exonerated by a court of inquiry. 

1867 Toronto becomes the capital of Ontario.

1868 The Battle of Alcolea causes Queen Isabella II of Spain to flee to France.

1868 Opelousas Massacre: 200 blacks are killed at St. Landry Parish, Louisiana.

1874 Colonel Ronald Mackenzie raids a war camp of Comanche and Kiowa at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, and slaughters 2,000 of their horses.

1904 A woman is placed under arrest for smoking a cigarette on New York's Fifth Avenue.

1905 Birth: Max Schmeling, in Germany, world heavyweight boxing champ (1930-32).

1906 US troops reoccupy Cuba, and stay until 1909.

1909 Birth: Al Capp, in New Haven, Connecticut; cartoonist who will create the "Li'l Abner" comic strip.

1914 WW1: A general Austrian-German advance begins in Galicia. Hindenburg moves to assist the defeated Austrians and prevent the Russian invasion of Silesia. Four German corps of the Eighth Army are transferred by rail to the vicinity of Krakow.

1915 WW1: The British defeated the Turks in Mesopotamia at Kut-el-Amara.

1918 WW1: General Ludendorff loses his nerve in a meeting with Hindenburg and demands an armistice "at once." (Duffy)

1918 WW1: Sep 28-Oct 15 Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler participates in defensive operations in Flanders with 3 Company, 16 Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. (Maser) Hitler Remembers: "Now in the autumn of 1918 we stood for the third time on the ground we had stormed in 1914. The village of Comines, which formerly had served us as a base, was now within the fighting zone. Although little had changed in the surrounding district itself, the men had become different, somehow or other. They now talked politics. Like everywhere else, the poison from home was having its effect here also. The young drafts succumbed to it completely."

1928 The speaking ban on Hitler in Prussia is lifted. (Maser)

1929 Sep 27-28 The International Congress of Eugenics is held in Rome. Dr. C. B. Davenport, an American and president of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, sends Mussolini a memorandum, written by Professor Fischer (Berlin), on the importance of eugenics: "Maximum speed is necessary; the danger is enormous." (Science)

1929 British Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald visits the United States and Canada.

1937 FDR dedicates Bonneville Dam.

1939 WW2: The Polish army surrenders. Approximately 750,000 Poles have been taken prisoner-of-war by the Germans and the Soviets. The vast majority will never survive the war.

1939 WW2: Sep 28-29 The German-Soviet Friendship Treaty is signed in order to regulate the Polish borders. Poland is in effect partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union. During the fighting about 60,000 Polish soldiers have been killed, of whom some 6,000 were Jews.

1939 WW2: Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz forms a Polish government-in-exile in France.

1939 WW2: Lithuania annexes the Vilna region of Poland. Russia makes an agreement with Estonia, thus gaining naval bases on the Baltic.

1939 Church and Reich: Polish Cardinal August Hlond is allowed to broadcast a message to the Poles of the world over the Vatican Radio. The Pope, unhappy with the cardinal's presence in Rome, wants him to return to Poland, but the Germans will not allow it. (Lewy)

1939 WW2: General Wladyslaw Sikorski is named to command the new Polish army forming in France.

1939 Holocaust: An estimated 10,000 Polish Jews from Jaroslav are driven across the River San into Soviet occupied Poland. (Edelheit)

1941 Holocaust: A curt notice, its text printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German, appears on buildings, tree trunks and fences in Kiev. It orders all Jews to report the following day to the old Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town, not far from the railway station. The notice suggests that the Jews are going to be resettled. (Apparatus)

1944 WW2: Sep 28-29 4,000 Jews from Theresienstadt are sent to Auschwitz on two separate trains. Almost all are gassed, including all the old people and children. (Atlas)

1953 Death: Edwin Powell Hubble, (Rhodes Scholar, lawyer, astronomer; developed the concept of an expanding universe; designer of telescopes, The Hubble Space Telescope was named after him.

1959 Explorer VI takes the first video pictures of Earth and reveals an intense radiation belt around the Earth, though it comes as no surprise to a fellow named Van Allen, who had predicted as much.

1961 Syria withdraws from the United Arab Republic.

1961 US Navy Commander Forrest S. Petersen takes X-15 to 30,720m.

1964 Death: Adolph Marx. 'Like a Jewish kid with that given name has any choice than to keep his mouth shut and become a comedian.'

1967 The first mayor of Washington, DC, takes office: Walter Washington.

1970 Death: Nasser, Egyptian Pres, of a heart attack at 52. He is replaced by Sadat.

1972 Communist China and Japan agree to reestablish diplomatic relations.

1978 The Israeli Knesset endorses the Camp David accord.

1987 Mehdi Hashemi is executed for treason in an Iranian prison. Hashemi had at one time been a close aide to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

1991 In response to US President Bush's reduction of US nuclear arms (See Sep 28) Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev promises to reciprocate.

1991 Marion Barry, former mayor of the District of Columbia, is sentenced to six months in prison for possession of crack cocaine.

1995 Yasser Arafat of the PLO and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sign an accord that transfers control of the West Bank.

2001 Bush says the United States is "in hot pursuit" of terrorists.

2001 Administration official says US special forces have conducted scouting missions in Afghanistan.

2001 Pakistani delegation fails to persuade leader of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to surrender terrorist suspect bin Laden.

2001 The UN Security Council unanimously approves a US-sponsored resolution demanding all nations take sweeping action against terrorism.

2001 Attorney General John Ashcroft says authorities have arrested or detained more than 480 people.

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