September 2 in History

Cicero was 62 years old, semi-retired, and knew exactly how dangerous this was. Mark Antony controlled Rome's legions. Cicero controlled words. His first Philippic — named after Demosthenes' attacks on Philip of Macedon — was almost polite by his own later standards, criticizing Antony's governance while leaving a rhetorical door open. He'd deliver thirteen more, each sharper. Antony eventually had him killed, his hands and head displayed in the Roman Forum. Cicero had written about the duty to speak truth to power his entire career. He died proving he meant it.

Galla Placidia had already been captured by Visigoths, married their king, widowed, ransomed back to Rome, and forced into a second marriage by her own brother before Constantius III died suddenly in 421 — just seven months into his reign as co-emperor. She was 32. She'd then become empress regent, the most powerful woman in the Western Roman Empire, ruling on behalf of her young son Valentinian III for over a decade. Her first husband had been a barbarian. Her second, an emperor. She outlasted them both.

Richard had spent three years fighting for Jerusalem and never took it. The Treaty of Jaffa was his admission that he couldn't — but he negotiated hard. Saladin agreed to let unarmed Christian pilgrims visit Jerusalem freely, and the coastal strip from Acre to Jaffa stayed in Crusader hands. Both men apparently respected each other deeply; there are accounts of Saladin sending Richard fruit and ice during his illness. Richard left Palestine and never returned. Jerusalem stayed in Muslim hands. The mutual respect between enemies remains the strangest footnote.

Pope Innocent X didn't just defeat Castro — he erased it. After years of feuding with the Farnese family who ruled the small city-state north of Rome, he sent his forces in and demolished every building, salted the land, and declared the site uninhabitable. Castro had a cathedral, palaces, 700 years of urban history. None of it mattered. The Pope left a single column standing with an inscription calling the place a den of iniquity. The site stayed empty for three centuries. Towns don't usually lose arguments with popes.

The British weren't attacking Copenhagen's military — they were attacking its harbor. Nelson's former fleet chaplain-turned-admiral, James Gambier, bombarded the city for three straight nights with Congreve rockets and incendiary shells, killing roughly 2,000 civilians and burning a third of the city, to seize the Danish fleet before Napoleon could. Denmark hadn't chosen sides yet. After the bombardment, they did — against Britain. The Royal Navy got the ships. And Britain spent the next eight years fighting a newly hostile Denmark.

Norway didn't have a university until 1811. Students who wanted higher education had to travel to Copenhagen — a foreign city in what was still, technically, a union their country didn't choose. Frederick VI founded the Royal Fredericks University partly to quiet Norwegian intellectual frustration with Danish cultural dominance. It worked and then backfired: the university produced exactly the educated class that drove Norwegian independence four years later in 1814. Frederick had funded his own opposition. The university was renamed the University of Oslo in 1939.

Lincoln reluctantly reinstated General George McClellan to command the Union Army after John Pope's catastrophic defeat at Second Bull Run left Washington vulnerable. The politically risky decision paid off within weeks when McClellan rallied demoralized troops to fight Lee's invasion to a standstill at Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history.

Union troops marched into Atlanta on September 2, 1864, after the city surrendered to General William T. Sherman. This decisive victory severed Confederate supply lines and shattered Southern morale, directly enabling Sherman's subsequent March to the Sea that crippled the Confederacy's ability to continue fighting.