Today is Thursday, Sept. 19, the 262nd day of 2013. There are 103 days left in the year.
In 1777, the first Battle of Saratoga was fought during the Revolutionary War; although the British forces succeeded in driving out the American troops, the Americans prevailed in a second battle the following month.
In 1796, President George Washington's farewell address was published.
In 1881, the 20th president of the United States, James A. Garfield, died 2 1/2 months after being shot by Charles Guiteau; Chester Alan Arthur became president.
In 1934, Bruno Hauptmann was arrested in New York and charged with the kidnap-murder of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.
In 1945, Nazi radio propagandist William Joyce, known as "Lord Haw-Haw," was convicted of treason and sentenced to death by a British court.
In 1957, the United States conducted its first contained underground nuclear test, code-named Rainier, in the Nevada desert.
In 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, visiting Los Angeles, reacted angrily upon being told that, for security reasons, he wouldn't get to visit Disneyland.
In 1960, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, in New York to visit the United Nations, angrily checked out of the Shelburne Hotel in a dispute with the management; Castro ended up staying at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem.
In 1961, Barney and Betty Hill, a New Hampshire couple driving home from vacation, experienced what they later claimed under hypnosis was a short-term abduction by extraterrestrials.
In 1962, the Western TV series "The Virginian" debuted on NBC.
In 1970, the situation comedy "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" debuted on CBS-TV.
In 1982, the smiley emoticon was invented as Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman proposed punctuating humorously intended computer messages by employing a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis as a horizontal "smiley face." :-)
In 1985, the Mexico City area was struck by a devastating earthquake that killed at least 9,500 people.
In 2003, former Hurricane Isabel raced from Virginia to Canada, delivering far less rain than expected but leaving millions without power. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's defense minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmad, surrendered to U.S. forces.
In 2008, struggling to stave off financial catastrophe, the Bush administration laid out a radical bailout plan calling for a takeover of a half-trillion dollars or more in worthless mortgages and other bad debt held by tottering institutions. Relieved investors sent stocks soaring on Wall Street and around the globe. China's food safety crisis widened after the industrial chemical melamine was found in milk produced by three of the country's leading dairy companies. Hours after performing for thousands of South Carolina college students, former Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and celebrity DJ AM were critically injured in a fiery Learjet crash that killed four people. (DJ AM, whose real name was Adam Goldstein, was found dead in his apartment on Aug. 28; he was 36.) Baseball's new instant replay system produced its first reversal when Tampa Bay's Carlos Pena had a two-run double changed to a three-run homer during the fourth inning of a game against Minnesota. (The Rays beat the Twins, 11-1.)
In 2012, members of Congress presented the Congressional Gold Medal to Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (ahng sahn soo chee) in a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. The Justice Department's internal watchdog found fault with the agency's handling of a gun-trafficking probe in Arizona that resulted in hundreds of weapons turning up at crime scenes in the U.S. and Mexico. The inspector general's report referred more than a dozen people for possible disciplinary action for their roles in Operation Fast and Furious. The Windseeker ride at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, Calif., broke down, leaving about 20 riders who expected a three-minute thrill dangling 300 feet over the amusement park for nearly two hours.
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