September 20 in History

Billie Jean King walked onto the court at the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973, carried in on a gold litter like Cleopatra, while Bobby Riggs arrived in a rickshaw pulled by women in tight outfits. The spectacle was pure carnival, but what followed was deadly serious. King demolished the fifty-five-year-old Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, before 30,472 spectators and a television audience estimated at 90 million worldwide, the largest to ever watch a tennis match. The Battle of the Sexes became one of the most culturally consequential sporting events in American history. Riggs, a former Wimbledon champion turned hustler and self-proclaimed male chauvinist, had challenged the best female players to prove that even an aging man could beat any woman. In May 1973, he had defeated Margaret Court, the world’s top-ranked woman, 6-2, 6-1 in a match dubbed the Mother’s Day Massacre. The loss embarrassed the women’s movement, and King, who had been reluctant to engage in what she considered a circus, felt compelled to accept Riggs’s challenge. King prepared meticulously, studying Riggs’s game and training with a focus on endurance and pace. Her strategy was to attack his backhand, keep him running, and use her superior conditioning to wear him down in the Houston heat. Riggs, who had trained erratically and spent more time promoting the event than preparing for it, was visibly tired by the second set. King dominated the net, hit crisp volleys, and never allowed Riggs to settle into the soft, junk-ball style that had undone Court. The match aired during a period of intense debate over gender equality. Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education and athletics, had passed just a year earlier. King had co-founded the Women’s Tennis Association months before the match, fighting for equal prize money and professional opportunities. Her victory did not end the debate, but it demolished the argument that women’s sports lacked competitive legitimacy. Decades later, athletes, politicians, and feminists still cite the Battle of the Sexes as a turning point in the fight for gender equity in athletics.

President George W. Bush stood before a joint session of Congress on the evening of September 20, 2001, nine days after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, and declared a war unlike any the nation had fought before. "Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there," he told the lawmakers. "It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." The speech framed the response to September 11 as an open-ended global campaign and defined the strategic posture of the United States for the next two decades. The address was delivered to a nation still in shock. Rescue workers were still pulling bodies from the rubble of the World Trade Center. The Pentagon was damaged and partially evacuated. Air travel had only just resumed after a four-day shutdown. Bush’s approval rating stood at 90 percent, and Congress had already passed a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force against those responsible for the attacks, with only one dissenting vote. Bush identified Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda as the perpetrators and issued an ultimatum to the Taliban government of Afghanistan: hand over the terrorist leadership and close the training camps, or share their fate. The Taliban refused, and American and British forces began bombing Afghanistan on October 7. The Taliban regime collapsed within weeks, though bin Laden escaped into the mountains of Tora Bora and evaded capture for nearly a decade. The doctrine Bush articulated that evening extended far beyond Afghanistan. The phrase "war on terror" became the justification for a vast expansion of executive power, including warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, enhanced interrogation techniques that critics called torture, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which the administration linked to the broader campaign despite tenuous connections to September 11. The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed on September 14, 2001, remained in effect for more than twenty years, providing legal cover for military operations in countries the original Congress never contemplated. The speech launched an era that reshaped American foreign policy, civil liberties, and the federal budget, with defense and homeland security spending exceeding six trillion dollars.

The Greek fleet, outnumbered and cornered in the narrow strait between the island of Salamis and the Attic mainland, destroyed the Persian navy on September 20, 480 BC, in the most consequential naval battle of the ancient world. Roughly 370 Greek triremes, fighting in waters too confined for the larger Persian fleet to maneuver, rammed and sank an estimated 200 to 300 enemy vessels while King Xerxes watched the disaster unfold from a golden throne erected on the shore. The victory at Salamis saved Greece from Persian conquest and preserved the independent city-states that would produce the foundations of Western philosophy, democracy, drama, and science. Xerxes had invaded Greece in the spring of 480 BC with an army and navy of staggering size, the ancient sources claim over a million soldiers and 1,200 warships, though modern estimates reduce these figures considerably. The Spartans had fallen at Thermopylae, Athens had been evacuated and burned, and the Greek alliance was fracturing under the pressure of imminent annihilation. The Peloponnesian states wanted to withdraw behind a wall across the Isthmus of Corinth. Themistocles, the Athenian commander, argued that the fleet was Greece’s only hope. Themistocles lured the Persians into battle through a calculated deception. He sent a slave to Xerxes with a message claiming that the Greek fleet was planning to scatter and that an immediate attack would trap them. Xerxes, eager for a decisive engagement, ordered his fleet into the strait during the night. At dawn, the Persian ships found themselves crowded into a channel barely a mile wide, their numerical advantage neutralized by the confined waters. The heavier Greek triremes, crewed by experienced rowers who knew the local currents and tides, attacked the disordered Persian line. The battle devolved into a chaotic melee in which Persian ships collided with each other as they tried to advance, retreat, or maneuver in the narrow waters. By afternoon, the Persian fleet was broken. Xerxes withdrew to Asia Minor with the bulk of his army, leaving a force under General Mardonius that was defeated at Plataea the following year. Salamis ensured that Greece remained free, and the century of cultural achievement that followed, including the construction of the Parthenon, the tragedies of Sophocles, the philosophy of Socrates, and the birth of Athenian democracy, unfolded in the space that victory at Salamis created.

Italian Bersaglieri troops poured through a breach in the Aurelian Walls near the Porta Pia on September 20, 1870, ending more than a thousand years of papal temporal sovereignty over Rome and completing the unification of Italy. Pope Pius IX, who had excommunicated the entire Italian government and refused all negotiation, ordered his small garrison to offer token resistance before surrendering to avoid a massacre. The cannon fire lasted approximately three hours. Forty-nine Italian soldiers and nineteen papal defenders died in the final battle of the Risorgimento. Italian unification had been proceeding in stages since 1859, when Piedmont-Sardinia, allied with France, drove Austria out of Lombardy. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s expedition of the Thousand had conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860, and the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 with Turin as its capital. But Rome, protected by a French garrison that Napoleon III maintained to please Catholic opinion at home, remained under papal control. The Italian government coveted Rome as its natural capital but could not risk war with France. The Franco-Prussian War solved the problem. When Prussia invaded France in July 1870, Napoleon III recalled his troops from Rome to defend Paris. Pius IX’s remaining defense consisted of roughly 13,000 soldiers, a mixture of papal Zouaves, Swiss Guards, and foreign volunteers. King Victor Emmanuel II sent a diplomatic note asking the pope to yield peacefully. Pius refused. General Raffaele Cadorna advanced on Rome with 50,000 troops and positioned his artillery facing the northeastern wall. The breach at Porta Pia became the foundational myth of the Italian nation-state. September 20 was celebrated as a national holiday until 1929, when Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with the Vatican, creating the independent state of Vatican City and granting the papacy sovereignty over 109 acres within Rome. Pius IX declared himself a prisoner of the Vatican and never left the papal enclave for the remaining eight years of his life. The relationship between the Italian state and the Catholic Church, strained to the breaking point at the Porta Pia, took nearly six decades to formally reconcile.

Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Sanlucar de Barrameda on September 20, 1519, with five ships and roughly 270 men, bound for a passage through South America that no European had ever found and a destination none of his crew could truly imagine. The expedition would complete the first circumnavigation of the globe, proving once and for all that the Earth was round and that the oceans were connected. Magellan himself would not survive to see it, killed in a skirmish on a Philippine beach less than halfway through the voyage. Magellan was Portuguese by birth but sailed under the Spanish flag, having been rebuffed by King Manuel I of Portugal when he proposed the westward voyage to the Spice Islands. King Charles I of Spain, eager to challenge Portugal’s monopoly on the eastern spice trade, funded the expedition. The fleet consisted of the Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepcion, Victoria, and Santiago, aging cargo vessels that had been refitted for the journey. Relations between Magellan and his Spanish captains were hostile from the start. The fleet spent months working down the coast of South America, enduring a mutiny that Magellan crushed by executing one captain and marooning another. In October 1520, they entered the strait at the southern tip of the continent that now bears Magellan’s name, a treacherous 350-mile passage through glacial mountains and howling winds that took thirty-eight days to navigate. The San Antonio deserted and sailed back to Spain. When the remaining ships emerged into the Pacific, Magellan wept with relief, naming the ocean for its unexpected calm. The Pacific crossing was a nightmare. The ocean was far larger than anyone had calculated, and the fleet sailed for ninety-eight days without sighting land. The crew ate sawdust, leather strips from the rigging, and rats, which sold for half a ducat apiece. Nineteen men died of scurvy before they reached Guam. Magellan was killed on April 27, 1521, on the island of Mactan in the Philippines, struck down in a battle he had provoked by attempting to convert the local chief to Christianity. Juan Sebastian Elcano took command of the Victoria, the sole surviving ship, and limped back to Spain on September 6, 1522, with eighteen gaunt survivors. They had sailed roughly 42,000 miles.

A massive earthquake off Japan's coast triggered a tsunami that swept away the wooden hall housing the Great Buddha at Kotoku-in temple in Kamakura. The bronze statue survived intact and has sat exposed to the elements for over five centuries since, becoming one of Japan's most recognized monuments and a evidence of resilience against natural disaster.