September 9 – Some important events on this day.
1000 👉🏼 Battle of Svolder, Baltic Sea: King Olaf on board the Long Serpent defeated in one of the greatest naval battles of the Viking Age.
As the Viking Age was drawing to a close, King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway rose to power, deposing his pagan predecessor and launching crackdowns on pagan worship in the name of spreading Christianity.
The first sources mentioning the battle were written almost two centuries and so offer a distant view on the causes of the battle, mentioning tensions over Tryggvason’s marriages and division of Norwegian territory.
The Norwegian king was defeated in the battle and jumped into the ocean as his ship was about to be captured. Afterward Norway was ruled by the Jarls of Lade as it came under Swedish and Danish dominance.
1493 👉🏼 Battle of Krbava field, a decisive defeat of Croats in Croatian struggle against the Ottoman Empire invasion.
1543 👉🏼 Mary Stuart, at nine months old, is crowned “Queen of Scots” in the central Scottish town of Stirling
1776 👉🏼 Congress officially renames the country as the United States of America (from the United Colonies)
1817 👉🏼 Alexander Twilight, probably first African American to graduate from a US college, receives BA degree at Middlebury College
1839 👉🏼 English scientist and astronomer John Herschel takes 1st glass plate photograph
1861 👉🏼 Nurse Sally Tompkins is officially commissioned as an officer (and its only woman officer) by the Confederate US Army
1903 👉🏼 6 km long Engadin-railroad tunnel in Switzerland inaugurated
1914 👉🏼 First fully mechanized unit in the British Army created – the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade (WWI)
1956 👉🏼 Elvis Presley makes first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”
1972 👉🏼 Soviet Union beats the United States 51-50 in the most controversial game in international basketball history; with US leading 50-49 the final 3 seconds is replayed 3 times until the Soviets finally win
1993 👉🏼 Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization exchange letters of mutual recognition
2012 👉🏼 17 people are killed and at least 40 injured after two car bombs explode in Aleppo, Syria
2015 👉🏼 Queen Elizabeth II becomes Great Britain’s longest-reigning monarch at 63 years and seven months, beating the previous record set by her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria
2019 👉🏼 Scientist reveal evidence of humans earliest milk consumption, 6,000 years ago from the dental plaque of teeth of prehistoric farmers from Britain