Historical Events on September 12

  • 1814: As the British attempt to advance in Baltimore, American forces halt their momentum at the Battle of North Point during the War of 1812.
  • 1846: Poet Elizabeth Barret elopes with playwright Robert Browning.
  • 1847: During the Mexican American War, the battle of Chapultepec starts.
  • 1857: Around 160-miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the SS Central America sinks. A total of 426 people – both passengers and crew – drown. This includes Capt. William Lewis Herndon. The SS Central America was carrying approximately 14 tons of gold from the California Gold Rush.
  • 1919: Adolf Hitler joins the German Worker’s Party on this day. This party would later become the Nazi Party.
  • 1923: Southern Rhodesia is annexed by the U.K. Today, this country is known as Zimbabwe.
  • 1933: Leó Szilárd comes up with the idea behind nuclear chain reactions while he’s waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury.
  • 1939: Adolf Hitler demands self-determination for Germans living in the Sudetenland of
  • 1940: In Lascaux, France, cave paintings are discovered.
  • 1942: The RMS Laconia is torpedoed off of the coast of West Africa killing civilians, Italian POWs and Allied soldiers.
  • 1943: Led by Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lt. Colonel) Otto Skorzeny, a rescue operation is undertaken by German commandos to free the dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini from house arrest in Gran Sasso.
  • 1952: an unexplained sighting of an unidentified extraterrestrial is seen by residents in Flatwoods, Virginia.
  • 1953: United States Senator and future U.S President John F. Kennedy marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island.
  • 1962: United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy gives a now famous speech at Rice University that affirms that the United States will put a man on the moon before the conclusion of the decade.

Famous Birthdays on September 12

  • Nobel Prize laureate, French chemist and physicist Irene Joliot-Curie is born in 1897.
  • American mathematician and logician Haskell Curry is born in 1900.
  • American race car driver Lou Moore is born in 1904.
  • Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice is born in 1907.
  • American Olympic sprinter and long jumper Jesse Owens is born in 1913.
  • American singer-songwriter Barry White is born in 1944.
  • American conductor John Mauceri is born in 1945.
  • English engineer David Grant is born in 1947.