September 18 in History

Jimi Hendrix died in London on September 18, 1970, 27 years old, from asphyxiation after taking a sleeping pill in a girlfriend's apartment. He'd been awake for three days. He died the same year Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison died, all three at 27, all three of drug-related causes, which created the '27 Club' mythology. He'd been playing guitar for eight years. In those eight years he'd changed what the electric guitar could do, using feedback and distortion and the whammy bar as compositional tools rather than accidents. He learned by listening to records at 78 rpm because that was the speed at which the machine ran. He didn't read music. He recorded 'Purple Haze,' 'All Along the Watchtower,' and 'The Wind Cries Mary' within his first year of fame. He had four more years after that.

British forces conquered Quebec on September 18, 1759, after General James Wolfe's troops scaled the cliffs above the city under cover of darkness and formed battle lines on the Plains of Abraham. French General Montcalm, instead of waiting for reinforcements behind Quebec's walls, rushed out to engage the British in open battle. His forces advanced in loose formations against disciplined British infantry that held fire until the French were within 40 yards, then delivered two devastating volleys that shattered the attack. Both commanders died. The fall of Quebec sealed the fate of New France: the Treaty of Paris in 1763 transferred Canada entirely to Britain, ending 150 years of French colonization and removing France as a North American power.

The FBI arrested Patty Hearst in a San Francisco apartment on September 18, 1975, nineteen months after the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped the 19-year-old newspaper heiress from her Berkeley apartment. During her captivity, Hearst adopted the name "Tania" and participated in armed bank robberies, including a notorious holdup at the Hibernia Bank captured on security cameras. Her defense attorney, F. Lee Bailey, argued she had been brainwashed through isolation, sexual assault, and sensory deprivation. The jury didn't buy it: she was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years. President Carter commuted her sentence after 22 months, and President Clinton granted a full pardon in 2001. Her case remains the landmark example of disputed criminal responsibility under coercion.

Emperor Domitian was assassinated on September 18, 96 AD, by a conspiracy involving court officials, his wife, and Praetorian prefects who feared they were next on his execution lists. A household steward named Stephanus, who had been faking an arm injury to conceal a hidden dagger for days, stabbed Domitian in the groin during a private meeting. A struggle ensued before other conspirators rushed in to finish the job. The Senate, which had been terrorized by Domitian's treason trials for fifteen years, immediately voted to damn his memory (damnatio memoriae), ordering his name erased from public records and his statues destroyed. The senators chose the elderly Nerva as his successor, inaugurating the reign of the "Five Good Emperors" that represented Rome's golden age.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was rejected by every law firm she applied to after graduating first in her class from Columbia Law School in 1959. She was a woman, she was Jewish, and she was a mother — three strikes. She ended up teaching law instead. Her strategy for dismantling gender discrimination in the courts was deliberate: she selected cases involving men discriminated against by gender-based laws, calculating that male judges would find those easier to sympathize with. It worked. By the time she joined the Supreme Court in 1993, the legal architecture of sex discrimination had been fundamentally altered by her earlier work. She died in September 2020, six weeks before a presidential election.

The fires that had been consuming Moscow for five days finally subsided on September 18, 1812, leaving three-quarters of the city in ruins. Napoleon had entered Moscow on September 14 expecting to find a functioning capital where he could negotiate peace with Tsar Alexander I. Instead, he found the city largely abandoned, its residents having fled. Fires broke out almost immediately, probably set by Russian saboteurs under Moscow's military governor Fyodor Rostopchin, though this remains debated. Napoleon stayed in the Kremlin for five weeks, waiting for a peace offer that never came. When he finally began his retreat on October 19, his army of 100,000 had no food, no winter clothing, and 1,000 miles of hostile territory to cross. Fewer than 27,000 made it back to France.