September 5 in History

Eight men in tracksuits scaled the fence of the Olympic Village in Munich at 4:30 a.m. on September 5, 1972, carrying duffel bags loaded with AK-47 assault rifles, Tokarev pistols, and hand grenades. Within minutes, the Palestinian group Black September had forced their way into the Israeli team's apartment at 31 Connollystrasse, killing wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano during the initial assault and taking nine other Israeli athletes and coaches hostage. The gunmen demanded the release of 234 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and two German leftist militants held in West Germany. The crisis played out on live television for 21 hours as roughly 900 million people watched worldwide, making it the first major terrorist attack broadcast in real time to a global audience. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir refused to negotiate or release prisoners, telling the German government that giving in to demands would invite attacks on Israeli citizens everywhere. The German authorities, lacking a specialized counterterrorism unit, devised a rescue plan that relied on police sharpshooters positioned at the military airfield at Furstenfeldbruck, where the kidnappers had demanded a plane to fly to Cairo. The rescue attempt was catastrophic. German snipers opened fire on the terrorists as they inspected the waiting aircraft, but there were only five sharpshooters for eight gunmen, and they had no telescopic sights, no communication radios, and no coordinated plan of attack. In the ensuing gun battle, the terrorists killed all nine remaining hostages, executing some inside the helicopters with automatic weapons and grenades. Five of the eight Black September members were killed, and three were captured. The Munich Massacre transformed international security permanently. Germany created GSG 9, its elite counterterrorism unit, and other nations followed with similar forces. Israel launched Operation Wrath of God, a years-long covert assassination campaign targeting Palestinians connected to the attack. The Olympics, conceived as a symbol of peaceful international competition, had become a stage for political violence, and the security apparatus surrounding major global events has never returned to its pre-Munich innocence.

Fifty-six delegates from twelve of the thirteen American colonies gathered at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, convening the First Continental Congress in response to the Intolerable Acts that Britain had imposed on Massachusetts after the Boston Tea Party. The delegates included George Washington, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and John Jay, a collection of political talent that would later fill the highest offices of a nation that did not yet exist. Georgia, the only absent colony, needed British military protection against Creek and Cherokee raids and could not afford to antagonize London. The Intolerable Acts, Parliament's punitive response to the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor, had closed the port of Boston, revoked Massachusetts's colonial charter, and allowed royal officials accused of crimes to be tried in England rather than by colonial juries. The legislation was intended to isolate Massachusetts and intimidate the other colonies into compliance. The opposite happened. Colonies that had been reluctant to challenge British authority saw in the Intolerable Acts a precedent that threatened all of their chartered rights. The Congress debated two competing visions over seven weeks. Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania proposed a Plan of Union that would have created an American parliament operating alongside the British one, a conciliatory approach that came within a single vote of adoption. The more radical delegates, led by the Adams cousins from Massachusetts and Patrick Henry from Virginia, pushed for economic warfare. The Congress ultimately adopted the Continental Association, a comprehensive boycott of British goods enforced by local committees of inspection that became, in practice, the first organs of revolutionary self-government. The First Continental Congress did not declare independence. Most delegates still hoped for reconciliation and framed their demands as a restoration of rights they believed were guaranteed by the British constitution. But the enforcement mechanisms they created, the committees and conventions that policed the boycott, built the organizational infrastructure of revolution. When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord seven months later, the Second Continental Congress had a framework of colonial cooperation already in place.

Sam Houston, the former governor of Tennessee who had abandoned his political career to live among the Cherokee before reinventing himself as the hero of the Texas Revolution, was elected the first president of the Republic of Texas on September 5, 1836. Houston won in a landslide, capturing nearly 80 percent of the vote against two opponents, running on the strength of his victory at the Battle of San Jacinto five months earlier, where his forces had destroyed the Mexican army and captured General Santa Anna in just 18 minutes of fighting. Houston's path to the Texas presidency was one of the most improbable in American political history. He had served as a congressman and then governor of Tennessee, apparently destined for national office, when his marriage collapsed after just eleven weeks in 1829. He resigned the governorship, crossed the Mississippi, and spent three years living with the Cherokee in what is now Oklahoma, earning the nickname "Big Drunk" for his heavy consumption of whiskey. He arrived in Texas in 1832 as a land speculator and quickly became enmeshed in the growing movement for independence from Mexico. The Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, made Houston a legend. After weeks of strategic retreat that infuriated his own troops, Houston attacked Santa Anna's army during an afternoon siesta near the confluence of the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou. The Texan force of roughly 900 men overwhelmed the 1,300 Mexican soldiers, killing over 600 and capturing the rest, including Santa Anna himself, in a battle that lasted less than twenty minutes. Houston was shot in the ankle during the charge but continued directing the fight from horseback. As president, Houston faced the enormous challenge of governing a republic that was bankrupt, sparsely populated, and threatened by Mexico, which refused to recognize Texas independence. He sought annexation by the United States, but the issue of adding a slave state to the Union delayed the process for nearly a decade. Texas joined the United States in 1845, and Houston went on to serve as one of its first U.S. senators and later as governor, making him the only person in American history to serve as governor of two different states.

Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997, five days after Princess Diana. The world had barely finished mourning one when it lost the other. The contrast between the two women, one defined by glamour and the other by austere devotion, dominated newspaper front pages for a week. Born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Ottoman Macedonia (now North Macedonia) on August 26, 1910, to an Albanian family, she joined the Sisters of Loreto at eighteen and was sent to India. She taught at a school in Calcutta for nearly two decades before experiencing what she described as a "call within a call" in 1946, a divine instruction to leave the convent and work directly with the poorest people she could find. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 with twelve members. The order grew into one of the largest and most visible charitable organizations on earth, running over 600 missions in 123 countries by the time of her death. Her nuns ran hospices, orphanages, soup kitchens, and clinics for people with leprosy, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. At the ceremony in Oslo, she used the acceptance speech to argue against abortion, which startled the committee and some of the audience. She was not a diplomat. She said what she believed. Her methods drew sharp criticism from aid workers, journalists, and medical professionals. Christopher Hitchens published a sustained critique in 1995, arguing that her clinics provided minimal medical care, that she glorified suffering rather than alleviating it, and that she accepted donations from dictators. Medical volunteers described facilities that lacked basic painkillers and reused needles. Her defenders argued that she was running hospices for the dying, not hospitals, and that comfort and dignity, not cure, were the mission. Her own spiritual life was far more troubled than the public knew. Letters published posthumously in 2007 revealed decades of spiritual darkness, a sustained absence of the faith she publicly professed. She described feeling abandoned by God for nearly fifty years. She was canonized as a saint by Pope Francis in 2016.

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme drew a Colt .45 pistol from a thigh holster beneath her red dress and pointed it at President Gerald Ford from a distance of two feet in the grounds of the California State Capitol in Sacramento on September 5, 1975. A Secret Service agent grabbed the weapon and wrestled Fromme to the ground before she could fire. The gun held four rounds in its magazine but had no bullet in the chamber, a detail that has never been fully explained: whether Fromme deliberately left the chamber empty or simply failed to rack the slide remains unknown. Fromme was 26 years old and a devoted follower of Charles Manson, the cult leader serving a life sentence for orchestrating the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969. She had remained fanatically loyal to Manson throughout his trial and imprisonment, camping outside the courthouse during proceedings and carving an X into her forehead to match the mark Manson had given himself. Her assassination attempt was motivated partly by environmental concerns, as she later claimed she wanted to draw attention to California's redwood forests, and partly by a desire to create a platform from which Manson could speak to the public. Ford had been president for barely a year, having assumed office after Richard Nixon's resignation in August 1974. He had not been elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency, making him the only president in American history to hold the office without winning a national election. The assassination attempt came during a period of intense political turmoil, and Ford faced a second attempt just 17 days later when Sara Jane Moore fired at him outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Fromme was convicted of attempted assassination and sentenced to life in prison. She escaped briefly from a West Virginia federal prison in 1987 but was recaptured within two days. She was paroled in 2009 after serving 34 years, making her one of the longest-held female prisoners in the federal system. The attempt on Ford's life was the first against a sitting president since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and prompted a significant overhaul of Secret Service protective procedures.

Crazy Horse, the Oglala Lakota war chief who had led the charge that destroyed George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, was bayoneted by a soldier at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, on September 5, 1877, dying from the wound within hours. The exact circumstances of his killing remain disputed, but the most widely accepted account holds that Crazy Horse resisted when he realized he was being led to a guardhouse rather than a meeting, and Private William Gentles drove his bayonet into the chief's lower back during the struggle. Crazy Horse was 35 years old. Crazy Horse had surrendered at Fort Robinson just five months earlier, bringing in roughly 900 followers after a brutal winter of pursuit by the U.S. Army. His surrender effectively ended the Great Sioux War of 1876, the conflict triggered by the Black Hills Gold Rush and the government's violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. At the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull led the combined Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces that killed Custer and over 260 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry, the worst defeat the U.S. Army suffered in the Indian Wars. The Army's suspicion of Crazy Horse deepened after his surrender. His prestige among the Lakota was enormous, and military commanders feared he would break away and resume fighting. Rival chiefs, including Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, reportedly fed false intelligence to the Army suggesting that Crazy Horse was planning an escape. When General George Crook summoned Crazy Horse to Fort Robinson for a meeting, the chief came willingly but was led toward the guardhouse. Upon seeing the barred cells, Crazy Horse drew a knife and struggled with the soldiers holding him. Little Big Man, a former ally, grabbed his arms, and Gentles struck with the bayonet. No photograph of Crazy Horse is known to exist. He reportedly refused to be photographed, believing the process captured a piece of the soul. His father took his body to an undisclosed location in the Dakota Territory, and the burial site has never been confirmed. The memorial being carved into Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills, begun in 1948 and still unfinished, honors a man whose resistance to American expansion made him a symbol of Indigenous defiance.

Japanese and Russian diplomats signed the Treaty of Portsmouth at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, on September 5, 1905, ending a war that had shocked the Western world by proving that a non-European power could defeat one of the great imperial armies. President Theodore Roosevelt had brokered the negotiations, summoning the exhausted belligerents to New Hampshire and shuttling between their delegations with a combination of charm, pressure, and blunt threats that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. The Russo-Japanese War had begun in February 1904 when Japan launched a surprise torpedo attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, Manchuria, striking before a formal declaration of war. Japan's military successes were comprehensive: the siege of Port Arthur, the Battle of Mukden, and most dramatically the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, where Admiral Togo Heihachiro annihilated the Russian Baltic Fleet after it had sailed halfway around the world to reach the war zone. Russia lost 21 ships and over 4,000 men at Tsushima; Japan lost three torpedo boats. Despite these victories, Japan was financially exhausted and lacked the resources to continue fighting indefinitely. Russia, reeling from the Revolution of 1905 that had nearly overthrown the Tsar, was equally eager for peace but unwilling to pay the large indemnity Japan demanded. Roosevelt persuaded the Japanese to drop their indemnity demand in exchange for Russian recognition of Japanese dominance in Korea and the transfer of the southern half of Sakhalin Island, a compromise that left neither side fully satisfied. The treaty's consequences reshaped the balance of power in East Asia for decades. Japan emerged as the dominant force in the Pacific, annexing Korea in 1910 and establishing the imperial ambitions that would lead to conflict with the United States four decades later. Roosevelt's mediation demonstrated that American diplomacy could operate on the world stage, but in Japan the treaty was deeply unpopular because the public expected greater spoils from such a decisive military victory. Riots erupted in Tokyo, and resentment toward the United States lingered for a generation.