September 28 in History

Alexander Fleming returned from a summer holiday to find a mess in his laboratory, and the mess changed the course of medicine. On September 28, 1928, the Scottish bacteriologist noticed that a petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria he had left uncovered before his vacation had been contaminated by a mold. Around the mold, the bacteria were dead. Fleming was working at St. Mary's Hospital in London, where he had spent years studying wound infections and antiseptics. His laboratory was famously untidy, with cultures stacked on benches rather than properly stored. This carelessness turned out to be essential. The contaminating mold, later identified as Penicillium notatum, had likely drifted in through an open window from a mycology lab one floor below. Had Fleming been more organized, he might have simply discarded the spoiled dish. Instead, he investigated. "That's funny," he reportedly said, pointing out the clear zone around the mold to his colleague Merlin Price. Fleming cultured the mold separately and discovered that it produced a substance capable of killing a wide range of disease-causing bacteria, including streptococcus, meningococcus, and the diphtheria bacillus. He named the substance penicillin and published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929. The medical establishment barely noticed. Fleming lacked the resources and chemical expertise to purify penicillin into a stable, concentrated form suitable for clinical use. The breakthrough languished for over a decade until Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at Oxford University revisited Fleming's work in 1939. Using techniques from biochemistry and industrial fermentation, Florey and Chain produced enough purified penicillin to begin human trials in 1941. The results were extraordinary: infections that had been death sentences became curable within days. American pharmaceutical companies, mobilized by the wartime need for the drug, scaled production from laboratory quantities to industrial volumes. By D-Day in June 1944, enough penicillin existed to treat every wounded Allied soldier. The drug saved an estimated 200 million lives in the 20th century alone. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Fleming's messy lab bench had launched the antibiotic era.

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin had agreed to carve up Eastern Europe before either of them fired a shot. On September 28, 1939, as German and Soviet armies completed their conquest of Poland, the two dictatorships signed the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty in Moscow, formalizing the partition of Poland along the Bug River and adding Lithuania to the Soviet sphere of influence. The agreement was an extension of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23, 1939, whose secret protocol had divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet zones. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, the Soviet Union waited sixteen days before invading from the east on September 17. Polish forces, already reeling from the German blitzkrieg, could not fight on two fronts. Organized resistance effectively ended by early October. The partition was brutal. Germany annexed western Poland directly into the Reich and created the General Government, a colonial administration over central Poland that became the site of the Holocaust's worst atrocities. The Soviets absorbed eastern Poland into the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republics. Both occupiers immediately began campaigns of terror against the Polish population. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, deported over a million Poles to Siberia and Central Asia in 1940 and 1941. In April 1940, on Stalin's direct orders, the NKVD executed approximately 22,000 Polish military officers, police, and intellectuals in the Katyn Forest and other sites, a massacre the Soviet Union denied responsibility for until 1990. The Germans implemented increasingly savage policies against both Polish Christians and Jews, culminating in the construction of extermination camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor on Polish soil. Poland lost approximately six million citizens during World War II, roughly half of them Jewish, representing about 17 percent of the prewar population, the highest proportional loss of any nation in the conflict. The September 28 treaty revealed the cynicism underlying both totalitarian regimes, allies of convenience who would be at each other's throats within twenty months.

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the most celebrated Roman general of his generation, stepped off a small boat onto the Egyptian shore and was stabbed to death before he could reach dry land. On September 28, 48 BC, the man who had conquered the eastern Mediterranean, cleared the seas of pirates, and reorganized a dozen kingdoms was murdered on the orders of the teenage Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII, who hoped to curry favor with Pompey's pursuing rival, Julius Caesar. Pompey had dominated Roman politics for two decades. His military campaigns in the east from 66 to 63 BC had expanded Roman territory from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, annexing Syria, reorganizing Asia Minor, and capturing Jerusalem. His triumphs earned him the cognomen Magnus, "the Great," a title that invited comparison with Alexander. Together with Caesar and Marcus Crassus, he formed the First Triumvirate, an informal alliance that controlled the Roman Republic. The alliance collapsed after Crassus died at Carrhae in 53 BC. Pompey, alarmed by Caesar's growing power and popularity after the conquest of Gaul, allied with the Roman Senate to demand that Caesar disband his legions. Caesar refused and crossed the Rubicon in January 49 BC, igniting civil war. Pompey's strategy was sound but slow. He withdrew from Italy to Greece, where he planned to gather eastern armies and navies for a decisive campaign. At the Battle of Pharsalus on August 9, 48 BC, Caesar's outnumbered but veteran legions shattered Pompey's larger force. Pompey fled by ship to Egypt, where he expected hospitality from young Ptolemy XIII, whose father had been a Roman client. Ptolemy's advisors calculated differently. Sheltering Caesar's enemy would invite Roman invasion; killing Pompey would win Caesar's gratitude. As Pompey's boat approached the shore, former Roman officers in Ptolemy's service drew their swords and cut him down. His head was preserved and presented to Caesar when he arrived days later. According to ancient sources, Caesar wept at the sight. The murder disgusted rather than pleased Caesar, who deposed Ptolemy and installed Cleopatra on the Egyptian throne. Pompey's assassination eliminated the last figure capable of challenging Caesar's supremacy and accelerated the Republic's collapse into dictatorship.

Ariel Sharon walked onto the most contested piece of real estate on earth accompanied by a thousand riot police, and the Middle East erupted. On September 28, 2000, the Israeli opposition leader visited the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem's Old City, sacred to both Jews and Muslims. The visit, which Palestinians viewed as a deliberate provocation, triggered the Second Intifada, a five-year spiral of violence that killed over 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis. The timing was combustible. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat had just left the Camp David Summit in July 2000 without reaching a final peace agreement. Both sides blamed each other for the failure. Frustration among Palestinians over continued settlement expansion, the stalled peace process, and deteriorating economic conditions in the occupied territories had been building for months. Sharon, a controversial figure who had been forced to resign as defense minister after a 1983 inquiry found him personally responsible for failing to prevent the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, was running for prime minister. His decision to visit the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif and consider the third holiest site in Islam, was widely seen as a calculated political move to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty over the contested site. The day after the visit, large-scale clashes erupted at the compound. Israeli security forces fired rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition at Palestinian demonstrators, killing several and wounding hundreds. The violence spread rapidly across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and within Israel itself. What began as stone-throwing protests escalated within weeks into armed confrontations, suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians, and massive Israeli military operations in Palestinian cities. The Second Intifada destroyed what remained of the Oslo peace process. Israel reoccupied West Bank cities, began construction of the separation barrier, and expanded settlements. Sharon won the prime ministership in a landslide in February 2001. The violence of 2000-2005 hardened positions on both sides and created the political conditions that have prevented a negotiated resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since.

Pierre Trudeau died on September 28, 2000, at eighty, leaving behind a Canada fundamentally reshaped by his force of personality and his constitutional reforms. He served as prime minister for nearly sixteen years across two periods, from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, dominating Canadian politics during an era when the country's national identity was actively contested. His most consequential achievement was the patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982, severing the last formal legislative link between Canada and the British Parliament and enshrining the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter transformed Canadian law by guaranteeing fundamental freedoms, democratic rights, mobility rights, and equality provisions that courts have since used to expand protections for minorities, women, and LGBTQ individuals. His combative defense of federalism during the Quebec sovereignty crisis defined the terms of the national unity debate for a generation. When Quebec separatists kidnapped a British diplomat and a Quebec cabinet minister during the October Crisis of 1970, Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, sending troops into Montreal. Asked how far he was prepared to go, he replied: "Just watch me." His creation of official bilingualism through the Official Languages Act of 1969 ensured that French and English would have equal status in federal institutions, a policy that remains in effect. He was charismatic, intellectual, and deliberately provocative, performing pirouettes behind the Queen's back and dating celebrities. His son Justin became prime minister in 2015, making the Trudeau name the closest thing Canadian politics has to a dynasty.

Peres served in every major role in Israeli government across seven decades: defense minister, finance minister, foreign minister, prime minister twice, president. He was 70 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for the Oslo Accords he'd helped negotiate. He was 93 when he died, still arguing for a two-state solution that the parties on both sides had effectively abandoned. His critics said he was naive. His defenders said he understood something about the alternative. He'd built Israel's nuclear weapons program in the 1950s and then spent the next sixty years trying to make weapons unnecessary. Both were sincere. Born Szymon Perski in Wiszniew, Poland in 1923, Peres emigrated to Palestine at age 11 with his family. His relatives who stayed behind were murdered in the Holocaust. He joined David Ben-Gurion's inner circle as a young man and was tasked with secretly developing Israel's nuclear capability at the Dimona reactor in the Negev desert, working with France to acquire the technology. The program gave Israel an undeclared nuclear arsenal that remains the foundation of its strategic deterrence. His turn toward peace came gradually. The Oslo Accords of 1993, which he negotiated secretly with PLO representatives in Norway, were meant to create a framework for Palestinian self-governance leading to statehood. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Rabin's assassination in 1995 by a Jewish extremist devastated Peres and the peace process alike. He lost the subsequent election to Benjamin Netanyahu by less than one percent. As president from 2007 to 2014, a largely ceremonial role, he continued advocating for peace while the political ground shifted decisively against it.