September 16 in History

Severus II had been handed the western Roman Empire by Galerius, but Maxentius — the son of the retired emperor Diocletian — refused to recognize him and raised his own claim in Rome. When Severus marched against Maxentius, his own troops defected. He surrendered in 307 at Ravenna, was imprisoned at Tres Tabernae, and was later killed — whether executed or forced to open his own veins, sources disagree. He'd been emperor for less than two years. The man who gave him the throne then invaded Italy trying to fix the mistake and failed completely.

There were 102 passengers crammed onto the Mayflower, but the ship wasn't meant for them — it was a cargo vessel, roughly 100 feet long, still reeking of the wine it usually transported. The crossing took 66 days. Two passengers died en route; one child was born at sea and named Oceanus. They'd aimed for Virginia but landed in Massachusetts, far outside any existing colonial charter. That navigational failure — or decision — meant they governed themselves under the Mayflower Compact before they'd even stepped ashore. American self-governance began because a ship missed its destination.

His father died in exile, and he was thirteen years old. James Francis Edward Stuart inherited the Jacobite claim to the British throne on September 16, 1701, one day after Louis XIV of France recognized him as King James III of England and VIII of Scotland. Parliament in London responded by passing the Act of Settlement, explicitly barring Catholics from the throne. James spent the rest of his life launching failed invasions from the continent — 1708, 1715 — and dying in Rome at 77, still calling himself king of a country he'd never ruled.

The Dutch stadtholder William V asked Britain to occupy his own colony rather than let French radical forces take it. It was protection through surrender — the 'Kew Letters' he signed essentially handed the Cape Colony to the British. The Battle of Hout Bay in September 1795 sealed it militarily. Britain returned the colony to the Dutch in 1803, then took it permanently in 1806. That second occupation shaped southern Africa's next two centuries. One exiled prince's anxious letter to London set in motion a chain of events that ended with apartheid.

Augustin-Jean Fresnel presented a note to the Academy of Sciences confirming that light splits into two rays when passing through stressed transparent materials. This direct refraction experiment validated David Brewster's hypothesis, establishing photoelasticity as a measurable physical phenomenon rather than an optical curiosity. Scientists immediately gained a practical tool for visualizing internal stress in glass and other solids, transforming how engineers analyze structural integrity.

It was built in Constantinople, survived the fall of the Ottoman Empire, two World Wars, and is still operating today. Robert College was founded in 1863 by American philanthropist Christopher Robert and missionary Cyrus Hamlin, who'd been making and selling soup to fund missionary work before pivoting to education. The school educated future prime ministers, presidents, and revolutionaries from across the Balkans and Middle East. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Robert College graduates were in the rooms where new nations were being designed. Hamlin's soup operation turned into the oldest continuously operating American educational institution outside the U.S.

The Okeechobee hurricane killed more than 2,500 people, but almost none of them were in the path of the wind. They drowned when Lake Okeechobee's dike — a low mud levee — collapsed and sent a wall of water across the flat farmland of southeastern Florida. Some bodies were never recovered; hundreds were buried in mass graves. The disaster prompted the Army Corps of Engineers to build the Herbert Hoover Dike. It's the third deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history and barely anyone's heard of it, because the Galveston hurricane a generation earlier had taken 8,000.

He served as Speaker for 17 years across three separate tenures — longer than anyone in history. Sam Rayburn was first elected Speaker on September 16, 1940, and he ran the House through the New Deal, World War II, the Korean War, and the early Cold War. He mentored Lyndon Johnson. He passed more major legislation than almost any Speaker before or since. And he did it without an office phone for the first several years, preferring to conduct business face to face over bourbon in a private room he called 'the Board of Education.'

The British and Soviets had already invaded in August — this was the formal handover. On September 16, 1941, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who'd tried to stay neutral while accepting German engineers and advisors into his oil-rich country, was forced to abdicate and sent into exile, dying in South Africa two years later. His 21-year-old son Mohammad Reza took the throne. The Allies needed Iran's railways to move supplies to the Soviet Union. The young Shah who replaced his father would rule for 38 years — until his own people forced him out in 1979.

Heinrich von Vietinghoff's withdrawal order from Salerno came after nine days of fighting so fierce that Allied commanders had briefly considered re-evacuating the beachhead entirely. General Mark Clark had been within hours of ordering his forces back to the ships. The Germans had nearly pushed them into the sea. But massive naval gunfire — ships firing point-blank at tank formations — held the line. Von Vietinghoff pulled back on September 16, 1943. The Allies had survived by the narrowest possible margin and would spend the next 20 months grinding up the Italian peninsula to prove it.