September 6 in History

Leon Czolgosz waited in the receiving line at the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901, his right hand wrapped in a handkerchief concealing a .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver. When President William McKinley reached out to shake his hand, Czolgosz fired twice into the president's abdomen at point-blank range. McKinley staggered, looked at his attacker, and said, "Don't let them hurt him." The president died eight days later from gangrene caused by a bullet that doctors could not locate, despite the exposition featuring an X-ray machine that was never used on him. Czolgosz was a 28-year-old unemployed factory worker from Cleveland who described himself as an anarchist, though organized anarchist groups in the United States had rejected him as unstable and possibly a government spy. He claimed to have been inspired by the political philosophy of Emma Goldman and by the assassination of King Umberto I of Italy by an anarchist the previous year. His motivations were both ideological and personal: he believed McKinley was an agent of wealth and privilege, and he harbored the directionless rage of a man whom the industrial economy had discarded. McKinley had been reelected in 1900 on a platform of prosperity and imperial expansion, carrying 28 of 45 states against William Jennings Bryan. His presidency had overseen the Spanish-American War, the annexation of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, and a booming economy fueled by industrial growth. His assassination elevated Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, at 42 the youngest person ever to assume the presidency, and inaugurated the Progressive Era of American politics. Czolgosz was tried, convicted, and executed in the electric chair at Auburn Prison just 45 days after the shooting, one of the fastest progressions from arrest to execution in American history. His last words were, "I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people." McKinley's death was the third presidential assassination in 36 years, following Lincoln and Garfield, and it prompted Congress to formally assign the Secret Service to presidential protection, a role the agency has held ever since.

Nazi Germany issued a police decree on September 6, 1941, requiring all Jews over the age of six in German-occupied territory to wear a yellow Star of David prominently displayed on their outer clothing, with the word "Jude" inscribed in black pseudo-Hebrew lettering at its center. The regulation, signed by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, made Jewish identity inescapable and public, stripping away any remaining possibility of anonymity in a society that had been systematically persecuting its Jewish citizens for eight years. Failure to wear the star was punishable by fine, imprisonment, or deportation. The yellow badge was not a Nazi invention. Marking Jews with distinctive clothing had precedents stretching back to medieval Europe, where various kingdoms and papal decrees had required Jews to wear pointed hats, colored patches, or distinctive rings. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 mandated that Jews and Muslims wear identifying marks to distinguish them from Christians. The Nazis deliberately revived this medieval practice, understanding its power to isolate and dehumanize. The timing of the decree was directly connected to the escalation of the Holocaust. Mass shootings of Jews in the Soviet Union had been underway since the German invasion in June 1941, and planning for the systematic extermination camps was already in progress. The star served a practical bureaucratic function: it made identification and roundup of Jews for deportation far more efficient. In the months following the decree, deportation trains began moving Jews from across occupied Europe to ghettos in the east, and by January 1942, the Wannsee Conference would formalize the "Final Solution." Reactions to the badge requirement varied across occupied Europe. In some countries, non-Jews wore yellow stars in solidarity, though the extent of this resistance has been debated by historians. In Denmark, the star was never implemented because the German occupation authorities recognized it would provoke open defiance. The yellow star became one of the most recognizable symbols of the Holocaust, a small piece of cloth that embodied an entire regime's machinery of dehumanization and mass murder.

Akira Kurosawa made his first film in 1943 and his last in 1993. Fifty years and thirty films. His influence on world cinema is so deep that directors who have never watched his work have been shaped by directors who have. Born in Tokyo on March 23, 1910, the youngest of eight children, Kurosawa trained as a painter before entering the film industry as an assistant director at PCL Studios (later Toho) in 1936. His directorial debut, Sanshiro Sugata, came in 1943. His early films explored contemporary Japanese society, but it was his period films, jidaigeki, that made him internationally famous. Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1950 and introduced Japanese cinema to Western audiences. The film told the same story from four contradictory perspectives, suggesting that objective truth might be inaccessible. The "Rashomon effect" became a term used in psychology and law to describe the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Seven Samurai in 1954 was three hours and twenty-seven minutes of masterful storytelling: seven warriors hired to defend a farming village against bandits. It set the template for the ensemble action film that every subsequent heist, mission, and team-up movie has followed. John Sturges remade it as The Magnificent Seven in 1960. Yojimbo in 1961, about a ronin playing two criminal gangs against each other, was remade almost shot-for-shot by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. George Lucas has acknowledged that Star Wars drew directly from The Hidden Fortress in 1958. His influence was structural, not stylistic. Directors who worked in completely different genres adopted his techniques: the wipe transition, the use of weather as emotional punctuation, the deep-focus ensemble staging, the slow reveal of character through action rather than dialogue. He struggled to find funding for his later films in Japan. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas helped finance Kagemusha in 1980 and Dreams in 1990. He died on September 6, 1998, at eighty-eight, having changed every genre he worked in.

The funeral cortege of Diana, Princess of Wales, left Kensington Palace at 9:08 a.m. on September 6, 1997, carried on a gun carriage through streets lined by over a million mourners who stood in near-total silence as the coffin passed. An estimated 2.5 billion people watched the ceremony worldwide, making it one of the most viewed events in the history of television. Three white wreaths lay atop the coffin draped in the royal standard: one from her brother, one from Prince William, and one from 12-year-old Prince Harry, who had placed a card among the flowers that read simply "Mummy." Diana had died six days earlier in a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, along with her companion Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul, who was later found to have been driving at high speed with a blood alcohol level more than three times the French legal limit. The paparazzi who had been pursuing her car were initially suspected of causing the crash, and public fury toward the tabloid press was immediate and fierce. The outpouring of grief that followed was unlike anything Britain had experienced in living memory, with mourners leaving an ocean of flowers outside Kensington Palace that stretched for blocks. The royal family's initial response was widely perceived as cold and out of touch. Queen Elizabeth II remained at Balmoral for days after the death, and no flag flew at half-staff over Buckingham Palace, a decision defended by protocol but condemned by the public. The queen ultimately bowed to public pressure, returning to London, ordering the Union Flag lowered to half-mast, and delivering a televised tribute to Diana on the eve of the funeral. The ceremony at Westminster Abbey featured an address by Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, whose barely contained anger at both the press and the royal family drew sustained applause that rippled from the crowds outside into the abbey itself. Elton John performed a reworked version of "Candle in the Wind," originally written about Marilyn Monroe, that became the best-selling single in history. Diana's death and funeral exposed the widening gap between the British monarchy's traditions and the emotional expectations of a modern public.

The Victoria, a battered carrack with only 18 surviving crew members aboard, limped into the harbor at Sanlucar de Barrameda, Spain, on September 6, 1522, completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. The ship had departed nearly three years earlier as part of a five-vessel fleet commanded by Ferdinand Magellan, who had been killed in the Philippines 17 months before the voyage ended. Juan Sebastian Elcano, a Basque navigator who had taken command after a series of mutinies, desertions, and Magellan's death, brought the Victoria home with a cargo of cloves that was valuable enough to pay for the entire expedition. Magellan's fleet of 270 men had sailed from Sanlucar on September 20, 1519, seeking a westward route to the Spice Islands of the Moluccas. The expedition crossed the Atlantic, navigated the treacherous strait at the southern tip of South America that now bears Magellan's name, and then spent 98 days crossing the Pacific without sighting land, a passage so brutal that the crew ate rats, sawdust, and the leather wrappings of the rigging. Twenty men died of scurvy during the Pacific crossing alone. Magellan was killed on April 27, 1521, in a skirmish with warriors led by Chief Lapu-Lapu on the island of Mactan in the Philippines. His decision to intervene in a local conflict, apparently to demonstrate Spanish military prowess and convert the islanders to Christianity, cost him his life and deprived the expedition of its most capable leader. The surviving ships and crew spent months wandering the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos before finally reaching the Moluccas and loading the spice cargo that justified the voyage financially. Only 18 of the original 270 men completed the circumnavigation aboard the Victoria. The ship itself was so worm-eaten and leaky that it required constant pumping to stay afloat during the final leg across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage proved conclusively that the Earth was round and that the world's oceans were connected, but it also demonstrated that a westward route to Asia was far longer, more dangerous, and less commercially viable than the Portuguese route around Africa.

The Mayflower weighed anchor and departed Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, carrying 102 passengers and approximately 30 crew members on a 66-day voyage across the North Atlantic toward a new life in North America. Roughly half the passengers were Separatist Puritans from Leiden, Netherlands, who had left England to worship freely but found Dutch society too liberal for their strict religious vision. The rest were what the Separatists called "Strangers," a mix of servants, craftsmen, and adventurers recruited to make the colony commercially viable for the merchant investors who had financed the expedition. The Mayflower was not the original choice for the voyage. A smaller ship, the Speedwell, was supposed to accompany it, but the Speedwell proved so leaky that the fleet turned back twice before the passengers consolidated onto the Mayflower alone. The delays pushed the departure dangerously late in the sailing season, meaning the colonists would arrive in North America at the onset of winter rather than with months to prepare shelters and plant crops. This timing decision contributed directly to the catastrophic mortality of the first winter. The crossing itself was brutal. The Mayflower, a cargo vessel roughly 100 feet long, packed its passengers below deck in a space about 80 feet by 25 feet with a ceiling height of barely five feet. Storms battered the ship so severely that a main beam cracked and had to be reinforced with a large iron screw the passengers had brought for their printing press. One passenger died during the voyage, and one child was born, whom his parents named Oceanus. The Mayflower made landfall at Cape Cod on November 11, 1620, far north of the intended destination in Virginia. Before going ashore, 41 of the male passengers signed the Mayflower Compact, a brief agreement to form a self-governing body and abide by majority rule. This document, drafted to prevent conflict between the Saints and the Strangers, became a foundational text in the development of American democratic self-governance. Half the passengers died during the first winter from disease, exposure, and malnutrition, but the colony at Plymouth survived and became the symbolic origin of English America.

Louisa Ann Swain, a 69-year-old housewife, walked into a bakery that served as a polling place in Laramie, Wyoming, on September 6, 1870, and became the first woman in the United States to cast a legal vote in a general election since New Jersey had revoked women's suffrage in 1807. Wyoming Territory had passed the nation's first women's suffrage law in December 1869, granting women the right to vote and hold public office without restriction. Swain cast her ballot before most of the men in town had arrived at the polls, making her the first to exercise a right that women in the rest of the country would not gain for another 50 years. Wyoming's suffrage law passed for reasons that were pragmatic as much as principled. The territory had a population of roughly 9,000 people, overwhelmingly male, and its legislators understood that granting women's suffrage would attract female settlers, generate national publicity, and signal that Wyoming was a progressive place to build a life. William Bright, the legislator who introduced the bill, was married to an advocate of women's rights, and Governor John Allen Campbell signed it on December 10, 1869. The law made no distinctions based on race, though in practice the territory's tiny non-white population had limited access to polling places. The 1870 election in Wyoming was closely watched by both suffragists and their opponents nationwide. Anti-suffrage commentators predicted chaos, marital strife, and the collapse of social order. None of it materialized. Women in Laramie and across the territory voted in orderly fashion, and the election proceeded without incident. The Laramie Daily Sentinel reported that women's participation had a calming effect on the polls, noting that male voters cleaned up their language and behavior in the presence of women. Wyoming's commitment to women's suffrage was tested when Congress pressured the territory to repeal the law as a condition of statehood in 1890. The territorial legislature reportedly sent a telegram to Washington declaring, "We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without women's suffrage." Congress relented, and Wyoming entered the Union as the first state with full women's voting rights, earning its enduring nickname: the Equality State.