September 6 in History

Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year-old unemployed mill worker and self-proclaimed anarchist, shot President William McKinley twice in the abdomen at point-blank range during a public reception at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901. McKinley initially appeared to recover, but gangrene set in and he died on September 14. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, who was hiking in the Adirondacks when word arrived, rushed back to Buffalo and took the presidential oath. Czolgosz was electrocuted 45 days later. McKinley's assassination was the third presidential murder in 36 years (after Lincoln and Garfield), and it prompted Congress to assign the Secret Service to permanent presidential protection detail.

Nazi Germany ordered all Jews in German-occupied territory over the age of six to wear a yellow Star of David on their outer clothing, effective September 19, 1941. The decree, issued on September 1 but enforced from September 19, was part of a systematic campaign to identify, isolate, and ultimately deport Jewish populations to ghettos and extermination camps. The star had to be visible at all times in public, and failure to comply was punishable by fine, imprisonment, or worse. The identification made escape nearly impossible and public persecution routine. Similar marking orders were extended across occupied Europe over the following months, facilitating the roundups and deportations that constituted the Holocaust.

Akira Kurosawa made his first film in 1943 and his last in 1993. Fifty years. Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1950 and introduced Japanese cinema to the world. Seven Samurai in 1954 set the template for the action ensemble film. Yojimbo in 1961 was remade almost shot-for-shot as A Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone. George Lucas has acknowledged that Star Wars drew directly from The Hidden Fortress. His influence wasn't academic — it was structural. Directors who'd never seen his films made films shaped by people who had. He died at eighty-eight in 1998 having changed every genre he worked in.

Princess Diana's funeral procession wound through London on September 6, 1997, as an estimated 2.5 billion people watched worldwide, making it the most-watched broadcast in television history at that time. Over a million mourners lined the route from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, covering the hearse with flowers. Elton John performed a rewritten version of "Candle in the Wind" that was later released as a single, selling 33 million copies and becoming the best-selling single since charts began. Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, delivered a pointed eulogy criticizing the media and the royal family. Queen Elizabeth II, who had initially resisted public mourning, bowed to the coffin as it passed Buckingham Palace, an unprecedented gesture that acknowledged the depth of public feeling.

The Victoria, a battered carrack crewed by eighteen emaciated survivors, limped into Sanlucar de Barrameda, Spain, on September 6, 1522, completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth. Ferdinand Magellan, who had organized and led the expedition, was dead, killed in a skirmish in the Philippines sixteen months earlier. Of the five ships and roughly 270 men who departed in September 1519, only one ship and eighteen men returned. Juan Sebastian Elcano, who navigated the Victoria home across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope, asked King Charles V for a coat of arms. He received one bearing a globe encircled by a ribbon reading "Primus circumdedisti me" (You first encircled me). Several of the crew had to be carried ashore.

The Mayflower departed Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, carrying 102 passengers across the North Atlantic. They had already tried twice with a companion ship, the Speedwell, which leaked so badly it was abandoned. The crossing took 66 days through autumn storms. One passenger died; one baby was born. The ship was aiming for the Virginia Colony near the Hudson River but was blown off course and made landfall at Cape Cod on November 21. Since they were outside any established colony's jurisdiction, 41 adult males signed the Mayflower Compact, establishing a framework of self-governance. Of the 102 passengers, only 53 survived the first winter, dying of scurvy, pneumonia, and exposure in makeshift shelters on the Massachusetts shore.

Louisa Ann Swain was 70 years old and carrying a yeast bucket when she walked to the polls in Laramie, Wyoming on September 6, 1870. Wyoming Territory had passed women's suffrage the previous December — partly as a publicity stunt to attract settlers, partly because the territorial legislature thought it was genuinely right. Swain became the first woman to legally vote in the U.S. since New Jersey stripped women's suffrage in 1807. She cast her ballot, collected her yeast, and went home. The territory kept the right.