September 28 – Some important events on this day.
48 BC 👉🏼 Pompey the Great is assassinated on orders of King Ptolemy of Egypt after landing in Egypt.
935 👉🏼 Saint Wenceslas is murdered by his brother, Boleslaus I of Bohemia
1066 👉🏼 William the Conqueror invades England landing at Pevensey Bay, Sussex
1542 👉🏼 Explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo discovers California, at San Diego Bay, naming it San Miguel and claims it for Spain
1621 👉🏼 Battle at Chocim Dniester: King Sigismund III Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth defeats an invading Ottoman Imperial army
1781 👉🏼 9,000 American and 7,000 French troops begin siege of Yorktown.
When the British colonial forces were defeated at Yorktown after a month of battle, American independence was essentially guaranteed, and the guns fell silent as the Revolutionary War ended.
The British had been led by Charles Cornwallis, who was backed up by German auxiliary units from the states of Ansbach and Hesse-Kassel. The Americans, commanded by George Washington, were supported by the French. After severely damaging the surrounded British forces in Yorktown, in Virginia, Cornwallis asked for a surrender on October 17, and negotiations were completed on October 19. Cornwallis himself was not present for the surrender ceremony, citing ‘illness’, but he did sign the document.
With the surrender, some 7,000 British soldiers became prisoners, and American essentially became an independent state. Having lost the last significant battle on the American continent, the British and American governments began to negotiate a final settlement, which concluded with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Under this agreement Britain recognized the United States as an independent country.
1785 👉🏼 Napoléon Bonaparte, aged 16, graduates from the elite École Militaire in Paris (42nd in a class of 51)
1887 👉🏼 Yellow River or Huáng Hé floods in China, killing between 900,000 and 2 million people, one of the deadliest natural disasters in history
1889 👉🏼 The first General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) defines the length of a meter as the distance between two lines on a standard bar of an alloy of platinum with ten percent iridium, measured at the melting point of ice
1939 👉🏼 German-Soviet Frontier Treaty is signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov; redraws German and Soviet spheres of influence in central Europe and transfers most of Lithuania to the USSR
1944 👉🏼 Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of President Theodore Roosevelt, is posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for directing troops at Utah Beach during the D-Day landings
1968 👉🏼 Beatles’ “Hey Jude” single goes #1 and stays #1 for 9 weeks
2019 👉🏼 Elon Musk unveils SpaceX spacecraft Starship, designed to travel to Mars and the solar system and land back on earth
2019 👉🏼 Hurricane Lorenzo becomes 1st category 5 storm to be recorded so far north and east, 1,420 miles southwest of the Azores