September 20 in History

Agnes of Poitou was the queen of Germany from 1043 and empress of the Holy Roman Empire from 1046 until 1056 as the wife of Emperor Henry III. From 1056 to 1061, she ruled the Holy Roman Empire as regent during the minority of their son Henry IV.

Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, commonly known as Saladin, was a Kurdish commander and political leader. He was the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty and the first sultan of both Egypt and Syria. An important figure of the Third Crusade, he spearheaded the Muslim military effort against the Crusader states in the Levant. At the height of his power, the Ayyubid realm spanned Egypt, Syria, Upper Mesopotamia, the Hejaz, Yemen, and Nubia.

Robert of Geneva was elected to the papacy as Clement VII by the cardinals who opposed Pope Urban VI and was the first antipope residing in Avignon, France. His election led to the Western Schism.

Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer best known for planning and leading the 1519–1522 Spanish expedition to the East Indies. During this expedition, he became the first European to encounter the Strait of Magellan, performed the first European crossing of the Pacific Ocean, and made the first known European contact with the Philippines. Magellan was killed in battle in the Philippines in 1521, but his crew, commanded by Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, completed the return trip to Spain in 1522, achieving the first circumnavigation of Earth in history.

Grave is a city and former municipality in the Dutch province of North Brabant. The former municipality had a population of 12,486 in 2021. Grave is a member of the Dutch Association of Fortified Cities.

The Walking Purchase, also known as the Walking Treaty, was a 1737 agreement between the family of William Penn, the original proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, and the Lenape native Indians. In the purchase, the Penn family and proprietors produced a deed to claim that a 1686 treaty with the Lenape ceded an area of 1,200,000 acres (4,860 km2) in present-day Lehigh Valley and Northeastern Pennsylvania in colonial Pennsylvania, which included a western land boundary extending as far west as a man could walk in a day and a half - its namesake.

The Ragamuffin War, also known as the Ragamuffin Revolution or Heroic Decade, was a republican uprising that began in southern Brazil during the regency period, centered in the province of Rio Grande do Sul and, for a time, extending into neighboring Santa Catarina. It began on 20 September 1835, when rebel forces seized Porto Alegre, and soon turned into a wider confrontation between Brazil's imperial government and an opposition coalition led by influential regional leaders, such as Bento Gonçalves and Antônio de Sousa Neto, who proclaimed the secession of the province and the creation of the Riograndense Republic following the rebel victory at the battle of Seival in 1836.

The Crimean War was fought between Russia and an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom, and Sardinia from October 1853 to February 1856. Geopolitical causes of the war included the Eastern question, the expansion of Russia in the preceding Russo-Turkish wars, and the British and French preference to preserve the Ottoman Empire to maintain the balance of power in the Concert of Europe.

Edward VII was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901 until his death in 1910.

The capture of Rome occurred on 20 September 1870, as forces of the Kingdom of Italy took control of the city and of the Papal States. After a plebiscite held on 2 October 1870, Rome was officially made capital of Italy on 3 February 1871, completing the unification of Italy (Risorgimento).

Chester Alan Arthur was the 21st president of the United States, serving from 1881 to 1885. A Republican from New York, he served as the 20th vice president under President James A. Garfield in 1881, assuming the presidency after Garfield's assassination. Arthur's administration saw the largest expansion of the U.S. Navy, the end of the so-called "spoils system", and the implementation of harsher restrictions for migrants entering from abroad.

RMS Olympic was a British ocean liner and the lead ship of the White Star Line's trio of Olympic-class liners. Olympic had a career spanning 24 years from 1911 to 1935, in contrast to her short-lived sister ships, RMS Titanic and the Royal Navy hospital ship HMHS Britannic. This included service as a troopship with the name HMT Olympic during the First World War, which gained her the nickname "Old Reliable", and during which she rammed and sank the U-boat U-103. She returned to civilian service after the war and served successfully as an ocean liner throughout the 1920s and into the first half of the 1930s, although increased competition, and the slump in trade during the Great Depression after 1930, made her operation increasingly unprofitable. Olympic was withdrawn from service on 12 April 1935, and later sold for scrap, which was completed by 1939.

The Holocaust resulted in the near total eradication of Lithuanian (Litvaks) and Polish Jews[a] in Generalbezirk Litauen of the Reichskommissariat Ostland in the Nazi-controlled Lithuania. Of approximately 208,000–210,000 Jews at the time of the Nazi invasion, an estimated 190,000 to 195,000 were killed before the end of World War II, most of them between June and December 1941. This genocide would also mark the beginning of Hitler's Final Solution. More than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was murdered over the three-year German occupation, a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust. Historians attribute this to the massive collaboration in the genocide by the non-Jewish local paramilitaries, though the reasons for this collaboration are still debated. The Holocaust resulted in the largest loss of life in so short a period of time in the history of Lithuania.

Moomin is a comic strip created by Swedish-speaking Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson, and followed up by her younger brother Lars Jansson, featuring their Moomin family of characters. The first comic strip, entitled Mumintrollet och jordens undergång was for the Finland newspaper Ny Tid. It was written between 1947 and 1948, at the request of the editor, a friend of Jansson's, Atos Wirtanen. The series was mainly an adaptation of Comet in Moominland.

Konstantinos Dovas was a Greek general and interim Prime Minister.

The Battle of Burki was a battle between the Indian and Pakistan Army during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 at Burki, a village that lies 11 km south-east of Lahore, Pakistan near the border with India and which is connected to Lahore by a bridge over the Bambawali-Ravi-Bedian Canal.

Hurricane Irene–Olivia was the first actively tracked tropical cyclone to move into the eastern Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic basin. It originated as a tropical depression on September 11, 1971, in the tropical Atlantic. The cyclone tracked nearly due westward at a low latitude, passing through the southern Windward Islands and later over northern South America. In the southwest Caribbean Sea, it intensified to a tropical storm and later a hurricane. Irene made landfall on southeastern Nicaragua on September 19, and maintained its circulation as it crossed the low-lying terrain of the country. Restrengthening after reaching the Pacific, Irene was renamed Hurricane Olivia, which ultimately attained peak winds of 115 mph (185 km/h). Olivia weakened significantly before moving ashore on the Baja California Peninsula on September 30; the next day it dissipated.

James Joseph Croce was an American folk and rock singer-songwriter. Between 1966 and 1973, he released five studio albums and numerous singles. During this period, Croce took a series of odd jobs to pay bills while he continued to write and record songs as well as perform concerts. After Croce formed a partnership with songwriter and guitarist Maury Muehleisen in the early 1970s, his fortunes turned. Croce's breakthrough came in 1972, when his third album, You Don't Mess Around with Jim, produced three charting singles, including "Time in a Bottle", which reached number one after his death. The follow-up album Life and Times included the song "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown", the only number-one hit Croce had during his lifetime.

Operation Caban, also known as the 1979 Central African coup d’état, was a bloodless military operation by the French intelligence service SDECE in September 1979 to depose Emperor Bokassa I, reinstate the exiled former president David Dacko, and rename the Central African Empire back to Central African Republic.

On September 20, 1984, the Shi'a Islamic militant group Hezbollah, with support and direction from the Islamic Republic of Iran, carried out a suicide car bombing targeting the US embassy annex in East Beirut, Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. The attack killed 23 people and 1 attacker.

South Ossetia, formally known as the State of Alania since 2017, or originally the Republic of South Ossetia, is a partially recognised state in the South Caucasus. It has an officially stated population of just over 56,500 people (2022), who live in an area of 3,900 square kilometres (1,500 sq mi), with 33,000 living in the capital city, Tskhinvali. It de facto borders only Russia and Georgia.

The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is a global military campaign initiated by the United States in response to the September 11 attacks in 2001. A global conflict spanning multiple wars, some researchers and political scientists have argued that it replaced the Cold War.

The Jena Six were six black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, United States, convicted in the 2006 beating of Justin Barker, a white student at the local Jena High School, which they also attended. Barker was injured on December 4, 2006, by the members of the Jena Six, and received treatment at an emergency room. While the case was pending, it was often cited by some media commentators as an example of racial injustice in the United States. Some commentators believed that the defendants had been charged initially with too-serious offenses and had been treated unfairly.

"Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) was the official United States policy on military service of homosexual people for a period of over 17 years, starting in the mid-1990s. Instituted during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the policy was issued under Department of Defense Directive 1304.26 on December 21, 1993, and was in effect from February 28, 1994, until September 20, 2011. The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service. This relaxation of legal restrictions on service by gays, lesbians, and bisexuals in the armed forces was mandated by Public Law 103–160, which was signed November 30, 1993. The policy prohibited people who "demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from serving in the United States Armed Forces, because their presence "would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability".

MV Nyerere was a Tanzanian ferry that capsized on 20 September 2018 while travelling between the islands of Ukerewe and Ukara on Lake Victoria. The Tanzanian government have declared that 228 people died as a result of the capsizing while 41 could be rescued. The capsized ferry was successfully righted, retrieved and unloaded more than one week after the disaster.