September 9 in History

Year 337 (CCCXXXVII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Felicianus and Titianus. The denomination 337 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.

The Battle of Saint George took place on 9 September 1320 between the Latin Principality of Achaea and the forces of the Byzantine governor of Mystras, at the fortress of Saint George in Skorta in Arcadia. As a result of the battle, Arcadia, the heartland of the Morea, came firmly under Byzantine control.

Anne of Brittany (Breton: Anna; 25/26 January 1477 – 9 January 1514) was suo jure Duchess of Brittany from 1488 until her death, and Queen of France from 1491 to 1498 and again from 1499 to her death. She was the only woman to have been queen consort of France twice. Anne was raised in Nantes during a series of conflicts in which the King of France sought to assert his suzerainty over Brittany. Her father, Francis II, Duke of Brittany, was the last male heir of the House of Montfort. Upon his death in 1488, Anne became duchess of Brittany, countess of Nantes, Montfort, and Richmond, and viscountess of Limoges. She was only 11 at that time, but she was already considered a desirable prospect for marriage because of Brittany's strategic position. The next year, she married Maximilian I of Austria by proxy, but Charles VIII of France saw this as a threat since his realm was located between Brittany and Austria. He started a military campaign which eventually forced the duchess to renounce her marriage. Anne eventually married Charles VIII in 1491. None of their children survived early childhood, and when the king died in 1498, the throne went to his cousin, Louis XII. Following an agreement made to secure the annexation of Brittany, Anne had to marry the new king. Louis XII was deeply in love with his wife and Anne had many opportunities to reassert the independence of her duchy. They had two daughters — although neither could succeed to the French throne due to the Salic law, the elder was proclaimed the heiress of Brittany. Anne managed to have her elder daughter engaged to Charles of Austria, grandchild of Maximilian I, but after Anne's death in 1514, her daughter married her cousin Francis I of France. This marriage later led to the formal union between France and Brittany. Anne was highly regarded in Brittany as a conscientious ruler who defended the duchy against France. In the Romantic period, she became a figure of Breton patriotism and she was honoured with many memorials and statues. Her artistic legacy is important in the Loire Valley, where she spent most of her life. She was notably responsible, with her husbands, for architectural projects in the châteaux of Blois and Amboise.

The Battle of Krbava Field (Croatian: Bitka na Krbavskom polju, Krbavska bitka; Hungarian: Korbávmezei csata; Turkish: Krbava Muharebesi) was fought between the Ottoman Empire of Bayezid II and an army of the Kingdom of Croatia, at the time in personal union with the Kingdom of Hungary, on 9 September 1493, in the Krbava field, a part of the Lika region in Croatia. The Ottoman forces were under the command of Hadım Yakup Pasha, sanjak-bey of the Sanjak of Bosnia, and the Croatian army was led by Emerik Derenčin, ban of Croatia, who served under King Vladislaus II Jagiello. Earlier in the summer of 1493, the Ottomans undertook a raid through Croatia into Carniola and Styria. Around the same time, clashes had been raging in Croatia between the House of Frankopan and the Croatian ban, but news of the Ottoman incursion forced them to make peace. The Croatian nobles assembled a large army and intercepted the Ottoman forces that were returning to the Sanjak of Bosnia. Poor tactics, and the choice to fight an open battle made by ban Derenčin against more experienced Ottoman cavalry, resulted in the total defeat of the Croatian army. There were no immediate territorial gains for the Ottoman Empire, but in the following decades the Ottomans gradually expanded into southern Croatia.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Genoa who completed four Spanish transatlantic voyages in the name of the Catholic Monarchs, opening the way for the widespread European exploration and colonization of the Americas. His expeditions were the first known European contact with the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese mariner, explorer and nobleman. His discovery of the first maritime route between Europe and India—around the Cape of Good Hope, then across the Indian Ocean from Malindi in Kenya to Kozhikode—opened up European exploration of, and commerce with, India, and is considered a landmark event in world history.

James IV (17 March 1473 – 9 September 1513) was King of Scotland from 11 June 1488 until his death at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. He inherited the throne at the age of fifteen on the death of his father, James III, at the Battle of Sauchieburn, following a rebellion in which the younger James was the figurehead of the rebels. James IV is generally regarded as the most successful of the Stewart monarchs of Scotland. He was responsible for a major expansion of the Scottish royal navy, which included the founding of two royal dockyards and the acquisition or construction of 38 ships, including Great Michael, the largest warship of her time. James was a patron of the arts and took an active interest in the law, literature and science. With his patronage, the printing press came to Scotland, the University of Aberdeen and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh were founded, and he commissioned the building of the Palace of Holyroodhouse and Falkland Palace. The Education Act 1496 passed by the Parliament of Scotland introduced compulsory schooling. During James's twenty-five-year reign, royal income doubled, the Crown exercised firm control over the Scottish church, and by 1493 had overcome the last independent Lord of the Isles. Relations with England improved with the Treaty of Perpetual Peace in 1502 and James's marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503, which led to the Union of the Crowns in 1603. The long period of domestic peace after 1497 allowed James to focus more on foreign policy, which included the sending of several of his warships to aid his uncle, Hans of Denmark, in his conflict with Sweden; amicable relations with the Pope, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and Louis XII of France; and James's aspiration to lead a European naval crusade against the Ottoman Empire. James was granted the title of Protector and Defender of the Christian Faith in 1507 by Pope Julius II. When Henry VIII of England invaded France in 1513 as part of the Holy League, James chose the Auld Alliance with the French over the "Perpetual Peace" with the English and led a large army across the border into England. James and many of his nobles were killed at the Battle of Flodden on 9 September 1513, fighting against the English forces of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's wife and regent. James was the last monarch in Great Britain to be killed in battle and was succeeded by his son James V.

Mary, Queen of Scots (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, was Queen of Scotland from 14 December 1542 until her forced abdication on 24 July 1567. The only surviving legitimate child of King James V of Scotland, Mary was six days old when her father died, and she inherited the throne. During her childhood, Scotland was governed by regents, first by the heir to the throne, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, and then by her mother, Mary of Guise. In 1548, she was betrothed to Francis, the Dauphin of France, and was sent to be brought up in France, where she would be safe from invading English forces during the Rough Wooing. Mary married Francis in 1558, becoming queen consort of France from his accession in 1559 until his death in December 1560. Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland in August 1561. The tense religious and political climate following the Scottish Reformation that Mary encountered on her return to Scotland was further agitated by prominent Scots such as John Knox, who openly questioned whether her subjects had a duty to obey her. The early years of her personal rule were marked by pragmatism, tolerance, and moderation. She issued a proclamation accepting the religious settlement in Scotland as she had found it upon her return, retained advisers such as James Stewart, Earl of Moray (her illegitimate half-brother), and William Maitland of Lethington, and governed as the Catholic monarch of a Protestant kingdom. In 1565, Mary married her half-cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; they had a son, James. Their marriage soured after Darnley orchestrated the murder of Mary's Italian secretary and close friend David Rizzio. In February 1567, Darnley's residence was destroyed by an explosion, and he was found murdered in the nearby garden. James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, was generally believed to have orchestrated Darnley's death, but he was acquitted of the charge in April 1567 and in the following month, he married Mary. Following an uprising against the couple, Mary was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle. In July 1567, she was forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son James VI. After an unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne, she fled southward seeking the protection of her first cousin once removed, Elizabeth I of England. As a great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England, Mary had once claimed Elizabeth's throne as her own and was considered the legitimate sovereign of England by many English Catholics, including participants in a rebellion known as the Rising of the North. Perceiving Mary as a threat, Elizabeth had her confined in various castles and manor houses in the interior of England. After eighteen and a half years in captivity, Mary was found guilty of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth in 1586 and was beheaded the following year at Fotheringhay Castle. Mary's life and execution established her in popular culture as a romanticised historical figure.

The Colloquy at Poissy was a religious conference which took place in Poissy, France, in 1561. Its object was to effect a reconciliation between the Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots) of France. The conference was opened on 9 September in the refectory of the convent of Poissy, King Charles IX (aged 11) himself being present. It broke up inconclusively a month later, on 9 October, by which point the divide between the doctrines appeared irreconcilable.

Sir Thomas Cavendish (1560 – May 1592) was an English explorer and privateer known as "The Navigator" because he was the first to deliberately attempt to emulate Sir Francis Drake, raiding Spanish towns and ships in the Pacific and then returning by circumnavigating the globe. Though Magellan-Elcano, Loaísa, Drake, and Loyola had all preceded him in circumnavigating the globe, Cavendish's own successful voyage, between 1586 and 1588, was the first deliberately planned circumnavigation. It made him rich from captured Spanish gold, silk, and treasure from the Pacific and the Philippines, with his richest prize being the 600-ton Manila galleon Santa Ana (also called Santa Anna). He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I of England after his return. He later set out for a second raid and circumnavigation but was not as fortunate and died at sea in 1592, at the age of 31.

The Continental Congress was a series of legislative bodies, with some executive function, who acted as the Provisional Government for the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain in North America, and the newly declared United States before, during, and after the American Revolutionary War. The Continental Congress refers to both the First and Second Congresses of 1774–1781 and at the time, also described the Congress of the Confederation of 1781–1789. The Confederation Congress operated as the first federal government until being replaced following ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Until 1785, the Congress met predominantly at what is today Independence Hall in Philadelphia, though it was relocated temporarily on several occasions during the Revolutionary War and the fall of Philadelphia.

Washington, D.C., officially the District of Columbia and commonly shortened to Washington, or DC, is the capital city of the United States, and its only federal district. The city stands on the north-east bank of the Potomac River, across from the state of Virginia, surrounded by Maryland to its north, east, and south. The district was named for Columbia, the female personification of the American nation, through which human form and attributes are applied to the United States. "Washington" is a more recent addition to the city's common name, and is from the name of George Washington, the first U.S. president. The U.S. Constitution in 1789 called for the creation of a federal district under exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress, which would become a constituent part of the Union that is not part of any state or territory. The Residence Act, adopted on July 16, 1790, approved the creation of the capital district along the Potomac River, and is considered the city's founding date. In 1800, when the capital was moved from Philadelphia, the 6th Congress started meeting in the then-unfinished Capitol Building, and the second president, John Adams, moved into the newly finished White House. In 1801, the District of Columbia, formerly part of Maryland and Virginia and including the existing settlements of Georgetown and Alexandria, was officially made the federal district; initially, the city was a separate settlement within the larger district. In 1846, Congress reduced the size of the district when it returned the land that Virginia had ceded, including the city of Alexandria. In 1871, it made the entire district into a single municipality. There have been several failed efforts to reduce the district further and admit the rest as a state since the 1880s, including a statehood bill that passed the House of Representatives in 2021 but was not adopted by the U.S. Senate. Designed in 1791 by Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the city is split into quadrants that meet at the Capitol Building, with 131 neighborhoods overall. As of the 2020 census, the city's population was 689,545. During the workweek, commuters from the city's Maryland and Virginia suburbs increase the city's daytime population to more than one million. The Washington metropolitan area, which includes parts of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, is the country's seventh-largest metropolitan area, with a 2023 population of 6.3 million residents. A locally elected mayor and 13-member council have governed the district since 1973, though Congress retains the power to overturn local laws. Washington, D.C., residents do not have voting representation in Congress, but elect a single non-voting congressional delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives. The city's voters choose three presidential electors in accordance with the Twenty-third Amendment, passed in 1961. Washington, D.C., anchors the southern end of the Northeast megalopolis. As the seat of the U.S. federal government, the city is an important world political capital. The city hosts buildings that house federal government headquarters, including the White House, U.S. Capitol, Supreme Court Building, and multiple federal departments and agencies. The city is home to many national monuments and museums, located most prominently on or around the National Mall, including the Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, and Washington Monument. It hosts 177 foreign embassies and the global headquarters of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, and other international organizations. Home to many of the nation's largest industry associations, non-profit organizations, and think tanks, the city is known as a lobbying hub, which is centered on and around K Street. It is also among the country's top tourist destinations; in 2022, it had an estimated 20.7 million domestic and 1.2 million international visitors, the seventh-most among U.S. cities.

The Grenelle camp affair was an event of the French Revolution which occurred under the Directory, on the night of 9 to 10 September 1796.

Alexander I of Russia (Russian: Александр I Павлович, romanized: Aleksandr I Pavlovich, IPA: [ɐlʲɪkˈsandr ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ]; 23 December [O.S. 12 December] 1777 – 1 December [O.S. 19 November] 1825), nicknamed "the Blessed", was Emperor of Russia from 1801, the first King of Congress Poland from 1815, and the Grand Duke of Finland from 1809 to his death in 1825. He ruled Russia during the period of the Napoleonic Wars. The eldest son of Paul I of Russia and Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg, Alexander succeeded to the throne after his father was murdered. As prince and during the early years of his reign, he often used liberal rhetoric but continued Russia's absolutist policies in practice. In the first years of his reign, he initiated some minor social reforms and (in 1803–1804) major liberal educational reforms, such as building more universities. Alexander appointed Mikhail Speransky, the son of a village priest, as one of his closest advisors. The over-centralised Collegium ministries were abolished and replaced by the Committee of Ministers, State Council, and the Supreme Court to improve the legal system. Plans were made, but never consummated, to set up a parliament and sign a constitution. In contrast to his westernising predecessors, such as Peter the Great, Alexander was a Russian nationalist and Slavophile who wanted Russia to develop on the basis of Russian rather than European culture. In foreign policy, he changed Russia's position towards France four times between 1804 and 1812, shifting among neutrality, opposition, and alliance. In 1805 he joined Britain in the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon, but after suffering massive defeats at the battles of Austerlitz and Friedland, he switched sides and formed an alliance with Napoleon in the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) and joined Napoleon's Continental System. He fought a small-scale naval war against Britain between 1807 and 1812 and took Finland from Sweden in 1809 after Sweden's refusal to join the Continental System. Alexander and Napoleon hardly agreed, especially regarding Poland, and the alliance collapsed by 1810. Alexander's greatest triumph came in 1812 when Napoleon's invasion of Russia descended into a catastrophe for the French. As part of the winning coalition against Napoleon, he gained territory in Poland. He formed the Holy Alliance to suppress the revolutionary movements in Europe, which he saw as immoral threats to legitimate Christian monarchs. During the second half of his reign, Alexander became increasingly arbitrary, reactionary, and fearful of plots against him; as a result, he ended many of the reforms he had made earlier in his reign. He purged schools of foreign teachers, as education became more religiously driven as well as politically conservative. Speransky was replaced as advisor with the strict artillery inspector Aleksey Arakcheyev, who oversaw the creation of military settlements. Alexander died of typhus in December 1825 while on a trip to southern Russia. He left no legitimate children, as his two daughters died in childhood. Neither of his brothers wanted to become emperor. After a period of great confusion (that presaged the failed Decembrist revolt of liberal army officers in the weeks after his death), he was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I of Russia.

Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor and experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical work.

The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger (Irish: an Gorta Mór [ənˠ ˈɡɔɾˠt̪ˠə ˈmˠoːɾˠ]), the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852. It constituted a major historical social crisis and had a significant impact on Irish society and history. The most severely affected areas were in western and southern Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—hence, in Irish, the period was contemporaneously known as an Drochshaol, which translates to "the bad life" and loosely translates to "the hard times". Debate exists regarding nomenclature for the event, including whether to use the terms "Famine", "Potato Famine" or "Great Hunger". The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". The population of Ireland on the eve of the famine was approximately 8.5 million. During the Great Hunger, roughly one million people died and over one million more emigrated, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% between 1841 and 1871, with some towns' populations falling by as much as 67%. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history. The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight throughout Europe. The impact of blight on food supply caused 100,000 deaths outside Ireland, and influenced much of the unrest that culminated in European Revolutions of 1848. Longer-term reasons for the scale of the famine's impact included the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. Initial government actions to alleviate famine distress, which were constructive but limited, were ended by a new Whig administration in London that pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine. Additionally, there was a widespread belief among members of the British upper class, and therefore among members of the British government, that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character. Aid resumed only to some degree at a later stage. Large quantities of food were exported from Ireland during the famine, and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy. This controversy contributed to the exacerbation of the Irish issue in British politics, the intensification of anti-British sentiment, the intensification of Irish nationalism and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in the eviction of tens of thousands of households, a situation exacerbated by a provision that forbade access to workhouse aid for those possessing more than one-quarter acre of land. The famine is considered a defining moment in the history of Ireland. Its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape, producing an estimated 2 million refugees and spurring a century-long population decline. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine became part of folk memory. Strained relations between many Irish people and the then ruling British government worsened further because of the famine, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions and boosting nationalism and republicanism both in Ireland and among Irish emigrants around the world. When the potato blight returned to Ireland in the 1879 famine, the Land League boycotted "notorious landlords", and its members physically blocked the evictions of farmers. The resulting reduction in homelessness and house demolitions led to a significant decrease in the number of deaths.

The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850 that temporarily defused tensions between slave and free states during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Designed by Whig senator Henry Clay and Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas, with the support of President Millard Fillmore, the compromise centered on how to handle slavery in recently acquired territories from the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). The provisions of the compromise included a provision that approved California's request to enter the Union as a free state, and strengthened fugitive slave laws with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The compromise also banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C. (while still allowing slavery), defined northern and western borders for Texas, while establishing a territorial government for the Territory of New Mexico that included no restrictions on whether any future state from this territory would be a free or slave state, and established a territorial government for the Territory of Utah, also with no restrictions if the territory would become a slave or free state. A debate over slavery in the territories erupted during the Mexican–American War, as many white Southerners sought to expand slavery to the newly acquired lands and many Northerners opposed any such expansion. The debate was further complicated by Texas's claim to all former Mexican territory north and east of the Rio Grande, including areas it had never effectively controlled. These issues prevented the passage of organic acts to create organized territorial governments for the land acquired in the Mexican–American War. In early 1850, Clay proposed a package of eight bills that would settle most of the pressing issues before Congress. Clay's proposal was opposed by President Zachary Taylor, anti-slavery Whigs like William Seward, and pro-slavery Democrats like John C. Calhoun, so congressional debate over the territories continued. The debate over the bill was among the most famous in Congressional history, where the divisions deteriorated into fistfights and the drawing of guns on the floor of Congress. After Taylor died, he was succeeded by Fillmore, at which time Stephen A. Douglas took the lead in passing Clay's compromise through Congress as five separate bills. Under the compromise, Texas surrendered its claims to present-day New Mexico and other states in return for federal assumption of Texas's public debt. California was admitted as a free state, while the remaining portions of the Mexican Cession were organized into the New Mexico Territory and Utah Territory. Under the concept of popular sovereignty, the white people of each territory would decide whether or not slavery would be permitted. The compromise also included a stringent Fugitive Slave Law and banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C. The issue of slavery in the territories would be re-opened by the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854), but the Compromise of 1850 played a major role in postponing the Civil War.

California is a state in the Western United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the north, the Mexican state of Baja California to the south, Nevada to the east, Arizona to the southeast, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. With a population of over 39 million across an area of 163,696 square miles (423,970 km2), it is the most populous U.S. state and the third largest by land area. Before European colonization, California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. European exploration in the 16th and 17th centuries led to the colonization by the Spanish Empire. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821, as a result of its successful war for independence. Following the U.S. conquest of California, part of the Mexican-American War, California was ceded to the United States in 1848. The California gold rush started in 1848 and led to social and demographic changes, including the California genocide. It organized itself and was admitted as the 31st state in 1850 as a free state, following the Compromise of 1850. Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second and fifth most populous combined statistical areas. Los Angeles is the state's most populous city and is ranked second in population in the nation. California's capital is Sacramento. Part of the Californias region of North America, the state's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast and metropolitan areas in the west to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east, and from the redwood and Douglas fir forests in the northwest to the Mojave Desert in the southeast. Two-thirds of the nation's earthquake risk lies in California. The Central Valley, a fertile agricultural area, dominates the state's center. The large size of the state results in climates that vary from moist temperate rainforest in the north to arid desert in the interior, as well as snowy alpine in the mountains. While California is warming and drying overall, with frequent wildfires, the state is also experiencing increasing weather whiplash. The economy of California is the largest of any U.S. state, with an estimated 2025 gross state product of $4.296 trillion as of Q3 2025. It is also the world's largest sub-national economy and, if it were an independent country, would be the fourth-largest economy in the world (behind Germany and ahead of Japan) by nominal GDP as of 2025. The state's agricultural industry leads the nation in output, fueled by its production of dairy, almonds, and grapes. Despite heavy reliance on seaborne foreign crude oil, California also refines some of its own oil, primarily drilled from Kern County. With the busiest port in the country (Los Angeles), California plays a pivotal role in the global supply chain, hauling in about 40% of goods imported to the US. Notable contributions to popular culture, ranging from entertainment, sports, music, and fashion, have their origins in California. The state also has made substantial contributions in the fields of communication, information, innovation, education, environmentalism, entertainment, economics, politics, technology, and religion. California is known for its contributions to the American film industry, hippie counterculture, beach and car culture, the personal computer, the internet, fast food, diners, burger joints, skateboarding, and the fortune cookie, among other inventions. Despite an exodus of filmmaking from California, Hollywood continues to be an important center of the U.S. film industry, one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; profoundly influencing global entertainment since the 1920s. The San Francisco Bay Area's Silicon Valley is the center of the global technology industry.

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.

The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union to preserve slavery in the United States. The South saw slavery as threatened because of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the growing abolitionist movement in the North. The war ended with Union victory, the dissolution of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery, freeing four million African Americans. Decades of controversy over slavery came to a head when Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed slavery's expansion, won the 1860 presidential election. Seven slave states in the South responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and forming the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy seized US forts and other federal assets in the South. The war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina. A wave of enthusiasm for war swept over the North and South, as military recruitment soared. Four more Southern states seceded after the war began and, led by its president, Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy comprised eleven states, containing a third of the US population. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued. During 1861–1862 in the western theater, the Union made permanent gains, though in the eastern theater the conflict was inconclusive. The abolition of slavery became a Union war goal on January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in rebel states to be free, applying to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the country. To the west, the Union first destroyed the Confederacy's river navy by the summer of 1862, then much of its western armies, and seized New Orleans. The successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River, while Confederate general Robert E. Lee's incursion north failed at the Battle of Gettysburg. General Ulysses S. Grant's western successes led Lincoln to promote him to command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlanta in 1864 to Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, followed by his March to the Sea, which culminated in his taking Savannah. The last significant battles raged around the ten-month siege of Petersburg, gateway to the Confederate capital of Richmond. The Confederates abandoned Richmond, and on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant following the Battle of Appomattox Court House, setting in motion the end of the war. Lincoln lived to see this victory but was shot by an assassin on April 14, dying the next day. By the end of the war, much of the South's infrastructure had been destroyed. The Confederacy collapsed, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and four million enslaved black people were freed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in an attempt to rebuild the country, bring the former Confederate states back into the United States, and grant civil rights to freed slaves. The war is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in the history of the United States. It remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. Of continuing interest is the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The war was among the first to use industrial warfare. Railroads, the electrical telegraph, steamships, the ironclad warship, and mass-produced weapons were widely used. The war left an estimated 700,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian deaths, making it the deadliest in American history. The technology and brutality of the Civil War foreshadowed the coming world wars.

Ahmed Urabi ([ˈæħmæd ʕoˈɾɑːbi]; Arabic: أحمد عرابي; 31 March 1841 – 21 September 1911), also known as Ahmed Orabi, Ahmed Arabi or Orabi Pasha, was an Egyptian military officer. He was the first political and military leader in Egypt to rise from the fellahin (peasantry). Urabi participated in an 1879 mutiny that developed into the ʻUrabi revolt against the administration of Khedive Tewfik, which was under the influence of an Anglo-French consortium. He was promoted to Tewfik's cabinet and began reforms of Egypt's military and civil administrations, but the demonstrations in Alexandria of 1882 prompted a British bombardment and invasion which led to the capture of ʻUrabi and his allies and the imposition of British control in Egypt. ʻUrabi and his allies were sentenced by Tewfik into exile far away in British Ceylon, as a form of punishment.

Amalthea () is a moon of Jupiter. It has the third-closest orbit around Jupiter among known moons and was the fifth moon of Jupiter to be discovered, so it is also known as Jupiter V. It is also the fifth-largest moon of Jupiter, after the four Galilean moons. Edward Emerson Barnard discovered the moon on 9 September 1892 and named it after Amalthea of Greek mythology. It was the last natural satellite to be discovered by direct visual observation; all later moons were discovered by photographic or digital imaging. Amalthea is in a close orbit around Jupiter and is within the outer edge of the Amalthea Gossamer Ring, which is formed from dust ejected from its surface. Jupiter would appear 46.5 degrees in diameter from its surface. Amalthea is the largest of the inner satellites of Jupiter and is irregularly shaped and reddish in color. It is thought to consist of porous water ice with unknown amounts of other materials. Its surface features include large craters and ridges. Close-range images of Amalthea were taken in 1979 by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, and in more detail by the Galileo orbiter in the 1990s.

World War I, or the First World War, also known as the Great War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Central Powers. One of the deadliest conflicts in history, World War I resulted in an estimated 15 to 22 million deaths, including those in war crimes and genocides. The war also contributed to the spread of the Spanish flu pandemic. The conflict saw important developments in weaponry, including the first large-scale use of machine guns, artillery, aircraft, chemical weapons, and tanks.

The Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 was fought between Greece and the Turkish National Movement during the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, between 15 May 1919 and 14 October 1922. This conflict was a part of the Turkish War of Independence. The causes and aims of the war have been debated and interpreted differently in the historiography. One major stated justification for the Greek military campaign was the protection of Greek populations amid continuing violence against Ottoman Greeks. By contrast, the Turkish National Movement presented the conflict as a defensive struggle to preserve Turkish homelands against foreign occupation. The armed conflict started when the Greek forces landed in Smyrna (now İzmir), on 15 May 1919. In the Greek Summer Offensive of 1920, they advanced inland and took control of the western and northwestern part of Anatolia, including the cities of Manisa, Balıkesir, Aydın, Bursa and Uşak, among others. In 1921, after another Greek victory in the Battle of Kütahya–Eskişehir, the Greek forces almost reached Ankara, but their advance was finally checked by Turkish forces at the Battle of the Sakarya. The Greek front eventually collapsed with the Turkish counter-attack in August 1922, and the war effectively ended with the recapture of Smyrna by Turkish forces and the great fire of Smyrna. As a result, the Greek government accepted the demands of the Turkish National Movement and returned to its pre-war borders, thus leaving Eastern Thrace and Western Anatolia to Turkey. The Allies abandoned the Treaty of Sèvres to negotiate a new treaty at Lausanne with the Turkish National Movement. The Treaty of Lausanne recognized the independence of the Republic of Turkey and its sovereignty over Anatolia, Istanbul, and Eastern Thrace. The Greek and Turkish governments agreed to engage in a population exchange.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (c. 1881 – 10 November 1938) was a Turkish field marshal and statesman who was the founder of the Republic of Turkey and served as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He led sweeping reforms, turning Turkey into an industrialising nation. Ideologically a republican, secularist, and nationalist, his policies and socio-political theories became known as Kemalism. Atatürk's personality cult and the Kemalist historiography developed around it have had significant and ongoing influences on Turkey's political culture and historical narrative. Born in Salonica in the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk was early on persecuted for agitating against Sultan Abdul Hamid II's autocracy, joining opposition movements like the Committee of Union and Progress and the Young Turks. He participated in the Young Turk Revolution and the 31 March Incident. His early military career saw him involved in the Italo-Turkish and Balkan Wars. He rose to prominence with his role in the Defence of Gallipoli during World War I. Following his country's defeat after the war, in the Turkish War of Independence he directed the Turkish National Movement in a nationalist resistance against Turkey's partition among the victorious Allied powers. Establishing the provisional "Ankara government", he achieved a Turkish victory against Greece, Armenia, France, and the United Kingdom, confirmed in the Treaty of Lausanne. During and after the war, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia outside of Istanbul, including the Kars region invaded by the Kemalist armies, was largely completed via large-scale massacres, flight, expulsions, and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. His government subsequently proceeded to abolish the Ottoman sultanate in 1922 and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey in 1923. As the president of the newly formed Turkish Republic, Atatürk introduced far reaching reforms to build a republican and secular nation-state with a modern, Western facing society. By the mid-1920s, opponents to Atatürk's rule were suppressed as a one-party regime was cemented around him. This included abolishing the Ottoman Caliphate and curtailing religion as part of a larger secularist campaign. The semi-secular Mecelle was replaced by a fully secular civil code. Western cultural mores were encouraged: such as the banning of the fez and certain men's clothing. State-owned enterprises were established, foreign industrial assets were nationalised, and the first five-year plan was implemented. He opened thousands of schools and introduced the Latin-based Turkish alphabet. Turkish women received equal civil and political rights during his presidency. His government carried out a policy of Turkification, trying to create a homogeneous, unified, and above all secular nation under the Turkish banner. Atatürk attempted rapprochement with Iran, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Romania, and Greece, as well as the creation of the Balkan Pact that resisted the expansionist aggressions of Italy and Bulgaria during the interwar period of the 1930s. He died on 10 November 1938 at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, at the age of 57; he was succeeded as president by his long-time prime minister İsmet İnönü. Atatürk has been praised for his military accomplishments, nation-building efforts, social and economic reforms, and diplomatic successes, serving as an inspiration to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements. He has been condemned for instituting a dictatorship, introducing assimilationist policies that targeted minorities like the Kurds, and continuing a persecution of Christian minorities started by the CUP, while conservative Muslims have criticised his secular agenda. The Turkish Parliament granted him the surname Atatürk in 1934, meaning "Father of the Turks" or "Turk like his ancestors", in recognition of the role he played in building the Turkish Republic.

Yleisradio Oy (lit. 'General Radio Ltd.'; Swedish: Rundradion Ab), abbreviated as Yle (Finnish: [ˈyle]; formerly styled in all uppercase until 2012), translated into English as the Finnish Broadcasting Company, is Finland's national public broadcasting company. Founded as a private enterprise in 1926 and nationalised in 1934, Yle is governed by an administrative council elected by the Parliament of Finland and is structured as a limited company, 99.98% of which is owned by the Finnish state. It employs around 3,000 people in Finland. Yle operates three national television channels, eight radio services, 23 regional radio stations, a multilingual website, and a multimedia streaming platform. As Finland is constitutionally bilingual—around 5.5% of the population speaks Swedish as their native language—Yle provides content in Swedish through its Swedish-language department, Svenska Yle. Additional content is provided in three Sámi languages and in several other languages. Yle is primarily funded by an annual tax assessed on Finnish citizens and corporations (the Yle tax). Yle receives no advertising revenue, as all of its services are advertisement-free. In 2025, Yle's annual revenue was about €550 million. Yle is a founding member of both the European Broadcasting Union and Nordvision, and was also a member of the International Radio and Television Organisation. In 2007, Yle hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki.

The Portuguese Navy, also known as the Portuguese War Navy or as the Portuguese Armada, is the navy of the Portuguese Armed Forces. Chartered in 1317 by King Denis of Portugal, it is the oldest continuously serving navy in the world; in 2017, the Portuguese Navy commemorated the 700th anniversary of its official creation.

World War II, or the Second World War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated, with many engaging in total war on an unprecedented scale. World War II was the deadliest conflict in history, causing the deaths of 60 to 75 million people, a majority of whom were civilians. Millions died as a result of massacres, starvation, disease, and genocides including the Holocaust. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes.

Sayadaw U Ottama was a Theravada Buddhist monk, author, and a leader of the Burmese independence movement during British colonial rule. The ethnic Rakhine (Arakanese) monk was imprisoned several times by the British colonial government for his anti-colonialist political activities.

George Robert Stibitz was an American researcher at Bell Labs who is internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was known for his work in the 1930s and 1940s on the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element.

The Treznea massacre occurred in the village of Treznea, Sălaj in north-western Transylvania on 9 September 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vienna Award, when Romania ceded Northern Transylvania to Hungary. The massacre was perpetrated by Hungarian Army troops with aid from some locals; 93 ethnic Romanians and Jews were killed.

The Empire of Japan , also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the period of Japanese history spanning 79 years, starting with the Meiji Restoration on 3 January 1868, and ending with ratification of the Constitution of Japan on 3 May 1947. From August 1910 to September 1945, it included mainland Japan, Okinawa, the Kurils, Karafuto, Korea, and Taiwan. The South Seas Mandate and concessions were de jure not internal parts of the empire but dependent territories. In the closing stages of World War II, with Japan defeated alongside the rest of the Axis powers, the formalized surrender was issued on 2 September 1945, in compliance with the Potsdam Declaration of the Allies, and the empire's territory subsequently shrunk to cover only mainland Japan. However, Okinawa was later returned to Japan in 1972.

The Allies, or Allied powers, formally referred to as the United Nations from 1942, were an international military coalition formed during World War II (1939–1945) to oppose the Axis powers. Its principal members were the "Big Four"—the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China.

The Fatherland Front was a Bulgarian pro-communist political resistance movement, which began in 1942 during World War II. The Zveno movement, the communist Bulgarian Workers Party, a wing of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union and the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party all became part of the OF. The constituent groups of the OF had widely contrasting ideologies and had united only in the face of the pro-German militarist dictatorship in Bulgaria. At the beginning, the members of the OF worked together, without a single dominating group. Professional associations and unions could be members of the front and maintain their organisational independence. However, the Bulgarian Communist Party soon began to dominate. In 1944, after the Soviet Union had declared war on Bulgaria, the OF carried out a coup d'état and declared war on Germany and the other Axis powers. The OF government, headed by Kimon Georgiev of Zveno, signed a ceasefire treaty with the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1945, most of BANU led by Nikola Petkov and most of the Social-Democrats had left the OF and became a large opposition group, which later on, after the 1946 Grand National Assembly election, would become a coalition named "Federation of the village and urban labour" with 99 MPs out of 465.

The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan and its puppet states between 1937 and 1945, following a period of conflict localized to Manchuria that started in 1931. It is often regarded as the beginning of World War II in Asia, as the wars became heavily intertwined after Japan attacked the United States. It was the largest Asian war in the 20th century.

Kim Il Sung was a North Korean communist revolutionary, military officer, politician, and dictator who founded the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), also known as North Korea, in 1948, and led it until his death in 1994. He was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Il and posthumously declared Eternal President. He was the third-longest serving non-royal head of state and government in the 20th century, in office for more than 45 years.

The 1954 Chlef earthquake struck El Asnam Province in French Algeria on 9 September at 02:04:43 local time. The shock measured 6.7 on the moment magnitude scale and had a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). It destroyed Chlef, then named Orléansville, leaving over 1,243 people dead and 5,000 injured. Damage was estimated at $6 million. It was followed by multiple aftershocks. Algeria faces annual earthquakes and has undergone several changes to its earthquake building codes since its first earthquake engineering regulations from 1717.

Elvis Aaron Presley was an American singer and actor. Referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll", he is widely regarded as one of the most culturally significant figures of the 20th century. Presley's energetic and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a mixture of influences across color lines during a transformative era in race relations, brought both great success and initial controversy.

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It administers federal housing and urban development laws. It is headed by the secretary of housing and urban development, who reports directly to the president of the United States and is a member of the president's Cabinet.

Hurricane Betsy was an intense, deadly and destructive tropical cyclone that brought widespread damage to areas of Florida, the Bahamas, and the central United States Gulf Coast in September 1965. The storm's erratic nature, coupled with its intensity and minimal preparation time contributed to making Betsy the first tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin to accrue at least $1 billion in damage. While the storm primarily affected areas of southern Florida and Louisiana, lesser effects were felt in the Bahamas and as far inland in the United States as the Ohio River Valley. Betsy began as a tropical depression north of French Guiana on August 27, and strengthened as it moved in a general northwesterly direction. After executing a slight anticyclonic loop north of the Bahamas, Betsy proceeded to move through areas of south Florida on September 8, causing extensive crop damage. After emerging into the Gulf of Mexico, the cyclone strengthened and reached its peak intensity equivalent to that of a Category 4 hurricane on September 10 before making its final landfall near Grand Isle, Louisiana, shortly thereafter. Once inland, Betsy was slow to weaken, and persisted for two more days before degenerating into an extratropical storm; these remnants lasted until September 13.

The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was enacted in the United States in 1966 to empower the federal government to set and administer new safety standards for motor vehicles and road traffic safety. The Act was the first mandatory federal safety standards for motor vehicles. The Act created the National Highway Safety Bureau. The Act was one of a number of initiatives by the government in response to increasing number of cars and associated fatalities and injuries on the road following a period when the number of people killed on the road had increased 6-fold and the number of vehicles was up 11-fold since 1925. The reduction of the rate of death attributable to motor-vehicle crashes in the United States represents the successful public health response to a great technologic advance of the 20th century—the motorization of the United States.

On September 9, 1969, Allegheny Airlines Flight 853, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 operating a regularly scheduled flight from Boston, Massachusetts, to St. Louis, Missouri, with stops in Baltimore, Maryland; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Indianapolis, Indiana, collided mid-air with a Piper PA-28 light aircraft near Fairland, Indiana. The left wing of the PA-28 sheared off the DC-9's rear tail assembly, causing both to crash, killing all 83 occupants on board both aircraft. More than 50 years later, the incident remains Indiana's deadliest commercial airline disaster.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Palestinian Marxist–Leninist organization founded in 1967 by George Habash. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the largest being Fatah.

The Attica Prison riot took place at the Attica Correctional Facility state prison in Attica, New York. The riot started on September 9, 1971, with a violent takeover of the prison control center in which one prison officer, William Quinn, was killed. It ended on September 13 with the highest number of fatalities in the history of United States prison riots. Of the 43 men who died, all but one guard and three inmates were killed by law enforcement gunfire when the state retook control of the prison on the final day of the riot. The Attica riot has been described as a historic event in the prisoners' rights movement.

Kentucky, officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the northeast, Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, and Missouri to the west. Its northern border is defined by the Ohio River. Its capital is Frankfort and its most populous city is Louisville. As of 2024, the state's population was approximately 4.6 million.

The 1976 Anapa mid-air collision was the collision of Aeroflot Flight 7957 and Aeroflot Flight S-31 on 9 September 1976, off the coast of Anapa in the Soviet Union. All 70 people on the two aircraft were killed in the crash. The primary cause of the accident was determined to be error by the air traffic controller; investigators never recovered the fuselage of the Yak-40.

Vietnam Airlines Flight 831, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashed in a rice field 6 kilometres N of Bangkok International Airport, while operating a flight from Hanoi, Vietnam to Bangkok, Thailand, on 9 September 1988. The cause of the accident is undetermined; however, the pilots reported the aircraft may have been struck by lightning as it approached to land. Three crew and 73 passengers died in the accident, whilst 14 others survived, including the captain, flight engineer, and one stewardess. This accident was the second deadliest accident at the time in Thailand, and is currently the fifth deadliest.

Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Dushanbe, its capital, is its largest and most populous city, with a population of over 1.2 million. Tajikistan borders Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east; it is narrowly separated from Pakistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor. Its total population exceeds 11 million.

Intermittent discussions are held by various parties and proposals put forward in an attempt to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through a peace process. Since the 1970s, there has been a parallel effort made to find terms upon which peace can be agreed to in both this conflict and the wider Arab–Israeli conflict. Notably, the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel included discussions on plans for Palestinian autonomy, but did not include any Palestinian representatives. The autonomy plan was not implemented, but its stipulations were represented to a large extent in the Oslo Accords.

The Space Shuttle program was the fourth human spaceflight program carried out by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from 1981 to 2011. Its official program name was carried over from the 1969 plan for the Space Transportation System (STS) of reusable spacecraft. Only the shuttle and supporting rockets were funded for development; a proposed nuclear lunar shuttle in the plan was canceled in 1972. It flew 135 missions and carried 355 astronauts from 16 countries, many on multiple trips.

Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan military leader and politician. Known as the "Lion of Panjshir", he was the foremost commander of the Afghan mujahideen against Soviet occupation during the Soviet–Afghan War from 1979 to 1989. Later, in the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias, and actively fought against the Taliban and their allies, from the time the regime rose to power in 1996, and until his assassination in 2001.

Space Shuttle Atlantis is a retired Space Shuttle orbiter vehicle which belongs to NASA, the spaceflight and space exploration agency of the United States. Atlantis was manufactured by the Rockwell International company in Southern California and was delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in Eastern Florida in April 1985. Atlantis is the fourth operational and the second-to-last Space Shuttle built. Its maiden flight was STS-51-J made from October 3 to 7, 1985. It was, along with Challenger, one of only two orbiters equipped to carry the Shuttle-Centaur booster.

The Dubai Metro is a rapid transit system in the city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The metro system consists of a network of two main lines: the Red Line and the Green Line. A third line, the Blue Line, is scheduled to open in 2029. A fourth line, the Gold Line, was announced on 22 April 2026, and is scheduled to open in 2032.

The Indian Space Research Organisation is the national space agency of India, headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka. It serves as the principal research and development arm of the Department of Space (DoS), overseen by the Prime Minister of India, with the Chairman of ISRO also working as the chief executive of the DoS. It is primarily responsible for space-based operations, space exploration, international space cooperation and the development of related technologies. The agency maintains a constellation of imaging, communications and remote sensing satellites. It operates the GAGAN and IRNSS satellite navigation systems. It has sent three missions to the Moon and one mission to Mars.

Songs of Innocence is the thirteenth studio album by the Irish rock band U2, released on 9 September 2014. It was produced by Danger Mouse, with additional production from Paul Epworth, Ryan Tedder, Declan Gaffney, and Flood. After the surprise announcement of the album at an Apple product launch event, it was digitally released the same day to all iTunes Store customers at no cost. It was exclusive to iTunes, iTunes Radio, and Beats Music until 13 October 2014, when it was released to retailers by Island and Interscope Records. The digital release made the record available to more than 500 million iTunes customers, for what Apple's CEO Tim Cook called "the largest album release of all time".

Elizabeth II was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states during her lifetime and was the monarch of 15 realms at her death. Her reign of 70 years and 214 days is the longest of any British monarch, the second-longest of any sovereign state, and the longest of any queen regnant in history.

North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and borders China and Russia to the north at the Yalu (Amnok) and Tumen rivers, and South Korea to the south at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The country's western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its eastern border is defined by the Sea of Japan. Pyongyang is the capital and largest city.

Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. It is bordered by Lebanon to the north, Syria to the northeast, Jordan to the east, and Egypt to the southwest. Israel's western coast lies on the Mediterranean Sea, its southern tip reaches the Red Sea, and to the east is Earth's lowest point near the Dead Sea. Jerusalem is the government seat and proclaimed capital, while Tel Aviv is Israel's largest urban area and economic centre.

On September 9th 2025, at about 11:30 p.m. CEST, 19 to 23 unarmed military drones entered Poland's airspace after allegedly being launched from Russia. The incursion triggered a Quick Reaction Alert; the Polish Air Force and other NATO militaries scrambled aircraft. Up to four drones were confirmed to have been shot down, most by the Dutch Air Force. Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk said that the drones "posed a direct threat". The airspace over Warsaw International Airport, Warsaw Modlin Airport, Rzeszów–Jasionka Airport, and Lublin Airport was closed while the Russian drone fleet was in Polish airspace.