TITLE: September 14: Anthems, Empires, and Ripples in Spacetime
September 14 has seen a composer racing to finish a masterpiece, a nation deleting part of its calendar, an emperor walking into a burning city, and scientists hearing two black holes collide. Here are seven moments that make this date worth remembering.
1. 1741 - Handel Completes Messiah
On September 14, 1741, George Frideric Handel finished Messiah, an oratorio of about two and a half hours. He had started it on August 22, so the whole work took just 24 days. Handel was 56 and his career was struggling. London audiences had lost interest in his Italian operas, and he had money problems. The librettist Charles Jennens had put together a text drawn from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and Handel set it to music with remarkable speed. According to legend, a servant found Handel in tears after he finished the "Hallelujah" chorus, and he said, "I did think I did see all Heaven before me." Historians doubt the story, just as they doubt the tale that King George II started the tradition of standing for the chorus. The music's real history is impressive enough. Messiah premiered in Dublin in April 1742 as a charity concert that helped free prisoners from debtors' jails, and Handel went on to conduct it for the benefit of London's Foundling Hospital. Nearly three centuries later, Messiah is still performed every year by professional orchestras, community choirs, and "sing-along" audiences around the world. For many families, hearing it is as much a part of the holidays as lights and carols, even though Handel wrote it during the heat of late summer.
2. 1752 - Britain Deletes Eleven Days
People who went to bed in London, Boston, or Philadelphia on the night of Wednesday, September 2, 1752, woke up on Thursday, September 14. Under the Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750, Britain and its colonies finally dropped the Julian calendar and adopted the Gregorian calendar, which most of Catholic Europe had used since 1582. The Julian calendar ran slightly too long. It added a leap day every four years without exception, so over the centuries it had drifted 11 days away from the seasons. Pope Gregory XIII's reform fixed the problem, but Protestant Britain had held out for 170 years. The same act also moved the start of the legal year from March 25 to January 1. Because of the switch, George Washington, born February 11, 1731 under the old calendar, now celebrates his birthday on February 22, 1732. Many people have heard that crowds rioted and chanted "Give us our eleven days!" The story is almost certainly a myth, based largely on a satirical painting by William Hogarth. A real trace of the change survives, though: the British tax year still begins on April 6, a leftover from the old calendar's March 25 new year plus the adjustment for the lost days.
3. 1812 - Napoleon Enters a Deserted Moscow
A week after the bloody Battle of Borodino, Napoleon Bonaparte rode into Moscow on September 14, 1812, expecting city officials to come out and surrender. No one came. Most of the city's roughly 270,000 residents had left, taking supplies with them. The emperor had captured Russia's historic heart and found it nearly empty. That night, fires started across the city. Fanned by wind, they burned for days and destroyed roughly three-quarters of Moscow. Historians still argue about the cause. Many point to the governor, Fyodor Rostopchin, who is believed to have ordered the fires set and the fire-fighting equipment removed. Others blame looting soldiers and chaos. Either way, Napoleon had no winter quarters and no supplies. Tsar Alexander I also refused to negotiate. Napoleon waited in the ruins for more than a month before starting a retreat in October. Cold, hunger, disease, and constant Cossack raids destroyed his army. Of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who invaded Russia, only a small fraction returned. The campaign broke Napoleon's image as unbeatable and started the collapse of his empire.
4. 1814 - "The Star-Spangled Banner" Is Born
Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old Washington lawyer, had sailed out to the British fleet near Baltimore to negotiate the release of his friend Dr. William Beanes. The British agreed to free Beanes but would not let the Americans leave until their attack was over. So Key spent the night of September 13–14, 1814, watching British ships fire rockets and mortar shells at Fort McHenry, which guarded Baltimore's harbor. The bombardment lasted about 25 hours. At dawn on September 14, Key looked toward the fort and saw a huge American flag, 30 by 42 feet, sewn by Baltimore flag-maker Mary Pickersgill, still flying. The fort had held. Moved by the sight, Key began writing a poem he called "Defence of Fort M'Henry." It was soon printed and set to the tune of "To Anacreon in Heaven," a popular British song. Americans sang the song for more than a century before Congress officially made it the national anthem in 1931. The flag Key saw survives at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where it is kept in a low-light, climate-controlled room.
5. 1901 - Theodore Roosevelt Becomes President
On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was greeting the public at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, when anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot him twice with a revolver hidden under a handkerchief. At first doctors expected McKinley to recover, and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt left for a vacation in the Adirondack Mountains. Then gangrene set in, and McKinley died early on September 14. A messenger found Roosevelt returning from a hike near Mount Marcy, New York's highest peak. After a rushed overnight trip by wagon and train, he took the oath of office that afternoon in a friend's home in Buffalo. At 42, he became the youngest president in American history, a record he still holds. Party leaders had given Roosevelt the vice presidency partly to keep him out of the way, and they were alarmed. One of them, Mark Hanna, reportedly complained that "that damned cowboy" was now president. Roosevelt went on to take on the big corporate trusts, build the Panama Canal, and protect about 230 million acres of public land. McKinley's assassination also led Congress to assign the Secret Service to guard presidents full time.
6. 1960 - OPEC Is Founded in Baghdad
In September 1960, representatives from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela met in Baghdad. On September 14 they formed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). They were angry because the "Seven Sisters," the Western oil companies that controlled most global production, had cut the prices they paid for crude without consulting the countries that owned the oil. The two key figures were Venezuela's Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo and Saudi Arabia's Abdullah Tariki. They argued that oil-producing nations should coordinate their policies and take control of their own resources. For its first decade, OPEC had little influence. That changed in the 1970s, as member states nationalized their oil industries and the 1973 Arab oil embargo sent prices soaring, causing gas lines and economic shocks across the West. Today OPEC and its wider OPEC+ alliance still move global markets, affecting everything from gas prices to inflation to geopolitics. The meeting in Baghdad marked the moment when control of oil began shifting from the companies that drilled it to the nations where it lay.
7. 2015 - Humanity Detects Gravitational Waves
At 09:50:45 UTC on September 14, 2015, a faint signal passed through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). It reached the detector in Livingston, Louisiana, first and the one in Hanford, Washington, about seven milliseconds later. About 1.3 billion years earlier, two black holes roughly 36 and 29 times the mass of our Sun had spiraled into each other and merged. In a fraction of a second they released more energy than all the stars in the observable universe combined, in the form of ripples in spacetime. Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1916, but he doubted anyone would ever measure them because the effect is so small. LIGO's 4-kilometer laser arms had to detect a change in length far smaller than the width of a proton. The detection happened during an engineering run, just days before the official observing period was due to start. The team spent five months checking the result before announcing it in February 2016. The discovery earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish, and it gave astronomy a new tool. Scientists could now observe the universe through gravity as well as light. Since then, detectors have recorded many black hole and neutron star collisions, which has opened a new field often called "multi-messenger astronomy."
Reflection: The Threads That Bind Us
These seven moments are separated by nearly three centuries, but they connect in unexpected ways. Handel finished Messiah in a Britain still using the old calendar, and eleven years later the date itself was rewritten. The same wars and empires that sent Napoleon into Moscow shaped the young United States whose flag survived at Fort McHenry. And the black hole collision LIGO detected in 2015 happened more than a billion years before Handel, Napoleon, or any human existed. History isn't a list of separate dates. Every September 14, a hymn, an anthem, a calendar, or a signal from deep space still reaches us, a reminder that we live on top of what earlier people built.