13. September

The cathedral works gave him a block of marble that Agostino di Duccio had started on and abandoned forty years before. Michelangelo, 26, carved a David 5.17 metres tall from it, in a walled-off yard behind the cathedral.

Recalled after three years’ exile, Calvin gave Geneva its church ordinances and a Consistory to police morals, and trained pastors for France at his academy. John Knox called the city “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles”.

In a field outside Frederick, Corporal Barton Mitchell of the 27th Indiana found a copy of Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 wrapped around three cigars. It showed that Lee had split his army. McClellan moved, but slowly.

Seward collects Van Helsing at the Berkeley and they drive to Hillingham, where Mrs. Westenra says she took the “horrible, strong-smelling flowers” from Lucy’s room in the night because it was stuffy. Van Helsing breaks down and sobs, and then, saying “To-day you must operate. I shall provide”,…

Paul Wolfskehl, a Darmstadt doctor turned mathematician, died leaving 100,000 marks to the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen for the first complete proof, with a deadline of 13 September 2007. A popular story says the problem talked him out of suicide; Klaus Barner found no evidence for it.

On the evening of the funeral, as the cortege left the palace, Nogi Maresuke and his wife Shizuko took their lives at home in Akasaka, in the old samurai custom of following one’s lord in death. Natsume Sōseki wrote it into his novel Kokoro.

Italy invaded Egypt from Libya in September 1940 and was routed; Rommel’s Afrika Korps arrived in February 1941. For two years the front swung back and forth along one coast road between El Agheila and El Alamein, until the Allies closed in from both ends.

The first human-made object to reach another world. It scattered metal pennants stamped with the Soviet coat of arms near the crater Archimedes, and days later Khrushchev gave Eisenhower a replica on his visit to the United States.

A day and a half after launch it struck the Moon near the crater Autolycus, the first human-made object to reach another world. It carried two balls of pentagonal metal pennants stamped with the Soviet emblem, and its spent upper stage hit the Moon shortly after.

Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka’s side-scrolling world, released in Japan first, with warp pipes, hidden blocks and a mushroom that doubles Mario’s size. Bundled with the NES, it sold over 40 million copies and was the best-selling game for more than twenty years.

A week after the last whites-only general election, under F. W. de Klerk, Archbishop Tutu and the mayor of Cape Town led a march against police violence, and the government let it go ahead. Tutu told the crowd on the Grand Parade that they were the rainbow people of God.

He was shot on 7 September in a car at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip, after a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand, and died six days later in hospital, aged 25. Duane “Keffe D” Davis was charged in 2023, and on 31 August 2026 a Las Vegas jury convicted him of first-degree murder for…

At about half past eight in the evening Robert Peston reported that Northern Rock had asked the Bank of England for emergency help. The Newcastle lender funded three-quarters of its mortgages by borrowing in the markets that had frozen in August, not from savers.