TITLE: September 6: Voyages, Votes, and Turning Points
1. 1522 - The First Circumnavigation of the Earth
On September 6, 1522, a battered ship named Victoria dropped anchor at Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the southern coast of Spain. Aboard were 18 emaciated men led by the Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano. Three years earlier, Ferdinand Magellan had left the same coast with five ships and roughly 270 sailors. The Victoria was the only vessel to make it home, and Magellan himself was not on it. He had been killed in the Philippines at the Battle of Mactan in April 1521. The voyage was a catalog of hardship. The fleet endured mutiny off Patagonia, the loss of one ship to wreck and another to desertion, a Pacific crossing so long that the crew ate leather and sawdust, and scurvy that killed men by the dozen. Yet the Victoria carried home a cargo of cloves from the Moluccas valuable enough to cover the cost of the entire expedition. The survivors also brought back a puzzle. Their meticulously kept log was one day behind the calendar in Spain. Sailing steadily westward, they had lost a day without realizing it, a discovery that later gave rise to the International Date Line. More than any single treasure, the voyage proved in practice what geographers had argued in theory: the world was round, its oceans connected, and it could be sailed all the way around.
2. 1620 - The Mayflower Sets Sail
The Mayflower's departure from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, was actually the third attempt to leave. The Pilgrims had originally planned to sail with two ships, but their companion vessel, the Speedwell, leaked so badly that the expedition twice had to turn back. Finally, the passengers who could fit crowded onto the Mayflower alone, some 102 of them, along with about 30 crew, and set out late in the season with winter approaching. The crossing took 66 days. Storms cracked a main beam, which the passengers reportedly braced with a large iron screw they had brought for house-building. One passenger died at sea, and one child, Oceanus Hopkins, was born. The ship made landfall at Cape Cod in November, well north of the Virginia territory it had been licensed to settle. That deviation mattered. Because they were outside the jurisdiction of their patent, the adult men drafted and signed the Mayflower Compact before going ashore, agreeing to form a civil body politic and abide by laws made for the common good. It was a modest document written under pressure, but it became one of the earliest examples of self-government by consent in what would become the United States.
3. 1870 - Louisa Swain Casts the First Ballot
Wyoming Territory passed the first law in the United States granting women full voting rights in December 1869. The following September brought the first general election held under that law. On the morning of September 6, 1870, Louisa Ann Swain, a 69-year-old Quaker grandmother, walked into a polling place in Laramie on her way to buy yeast and cast her ballot. Local accounts describe her as tidy, unassuming, and entirely unaware she was making history. Swain was not the first woman ever to vote in America; some women had voted in New Jersey before 1807, and others had voted in school elections. But she was the first to vote in a general election under a law that gave women the same suffrage rights as men, rather than an accident of wording or a limited local exception. Wyoming clung to its principle. When it applied for statehood in 1890, Congress pressured it to drop women's suffrage. The territorial legislature famously replied that it would rather stay out of the Union a hundred years than join without its women. Wyoming entered as the 44th state with suffrage intact, half a century before the Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote to women nationwide.
4. 1901 - The Shooting of President McKinley
The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, was a celebration of progress, electricity, and the confidence of a nation newly arrived as a world power. On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley stood in the Temple of Music greeting a long line of well-wishers. Among them was Leon Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker and self-described anarchist, who approached with a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. Hidden beneath it was a revolver. He fired twice at close range. One bullet glanced off a button; the other tore through McKinley's abdomen. Surgeons operated in a makeshift room at the fairgrounds, unable to find the bullet even though a newly invented X-ray machine was on display elsewhere at the exposition. McKinley seemed to rally for several days, then declined as gangrene spread. He died on September 14. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, who had been hiking in the Adirondacks, was sworn in at age 42, the youngest person ever to hold the office. His energetic presidency reshaped American politics, from trust-busting to conservation to the Panama Canal. The assassination, the third of a sitting president in 36 years, also led Congress to assign the Secret Service to permanent presidential protection.
5. 1972 - The Munich Massacre Ends in Tragedy
In the early hours of September 5, 1972, eight members of the Palestinian group Black September climbed a fence into the Olympic Village in Munich, killed two Israeli team members, and took nine others hostage. West Germany had staged the Games as a showcase of a peaceful, open democracy, and its security was deliberately light. Through a long day of negotiations, the attackers demanded the release of more than 200 prisoners held in Israel. Late that night the hostages and their captors were flown by helicopter to Fürstenfeldbruck air base, where German authorities had planned an ambush. The operation went wrong almost immediately. There were too few marksmen, no armored vehicles in position, and no night-vision equipment. In the firefight that followed, which ended in the early hours of September 6, all nine remaining hostages were killed, along with a German police officer and five of the eight attackers. The Games were suspended for a memorial service and then resumed, a decision that remains controversial. The failure led West Germany to create GSG 9, a dedicated counterterrorism unit, and reshaped how nations around the world approach security at major public events. The Munich massacre remains a defining moment in the modern history of terrorism and its consequences.
6. 1991 - The Baltics Go Free and Leningrad Becomes Saint Petersburg
The failed hardline coup of August 1991 shattered what remained of Soviet central authority. Within weeks, the republics were declaring independence faster than Moscow could respond. On September 6, 1991, the newly created State Council of the USSR, chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev, formally recognized the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The three Baltic states had been forcibly annexed in 1940 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and their departure was the first official acknowledgment that the Soviet Union was coming apart. The same day carried a symbolic change inside Russia itself. Residents of Leningrad had voted in a June referendum to restore the city's original name, and on September 6 the change became official. The city founded by Peter the Great in 1703 had been Saint Petersburg, then Petrograd during the First World War, then Leningrad after Lenin's death in 1924. Now it was Saint Petersburg again. Taken together, the two events mark the day the Soviet order visibly gave way. The Baltic recognition showed that the Union's borders were no longer fixed. The renaming showed that even Russia was reconsidering the revolutionary identity it had carried for seven decades. By the end of December, the Soviet Union would cease to exist.
7. 1995 - Cal Ripken Jr. Breaks the Unbreakable Record
Lou Gehrig played 2,130 consecutive games for the New York Yankees before the disease that now bears his name forced him from the lineup in 1939. For decades the streak was regarded as the one baseball record that would never be touched. On September 6, 1995, at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Cal Ripken Jr. of the Orioles took the field for his 2,131st straight game. The record became official when the game reached the middle of the fifth inning. Play stopped, the numbers on the warehouse wall beyond right field flipped from 2,130 to 2,131, and the crowd stood for more than 22 minutes. Ripken, pushed out of the dugout by teammates, jogged a full lap around the stadium shaking hands with fans. He had also homered in the fourth inning, as if to underline that he was there to play, not simply to appear. The moment arrived at exactly the right time for baseball. A bitter players' strike had cancelled the 1994 World Series and driven many fans away. Ripken's quiet, blue-collar consistency, showing up and doing the job every single day for 13 years, offered a reminder of why people loved the game. He extended the streak to 2,632 games before voluntarily sitting out in September 1998.
History Connects Us
The events of September 6 span five centuries, but they share a common thread. A ship's crew proved the world could be circled. A small band of religious dissenters gambled on an ocean crossing. A grandmother in a frontier town voted. A president fell to an assassin's bullet. Athletes died in a place meant to celebrate peace. An empire admitted it was dissolving. A ballplayer simply showed up, again and again, until showing up became legend. Each of these moments happened to ordinary people who could not have known what their day would come to mean. That is the quiet lesson of any date in history. The people who lived through September 6 in 1522, 1870, or 1995 were going about their lives, just as we are today. Looking back at them reminds us that the present is never as settled as it feels, and that the things we do on an unremarkable Sunday may one day be someone else's history.