05 September History
- 1666 - The Fire of London is extinguished after two days.
- 1664 - After days of negotiation, the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam surrenders to the British, who will rename it New York.
- 1792 - Maximilien Robespierre is elected to the National Convention in France.
- 1804 - In a daring night raid, American sailors under Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, board the captured USS Philadelphia and burn the ship to keep it out of the hands of the Barbary pirates who captured her.
- 1816 - Louis XVIII of France dissolves the chamber of deputies, which has been challenging his authority.
- 1859 - Harriot E. Wilson's Our Nig, is published, the first U.S. novel by an African American woman.
- 1867 - The first shipment of cattle leaves Abilene, Kansas, on a Union Pacific train headed to Chicago.
- 1870 - Author Victor Hugo returns to Paris from the Isle of Guernsey where he had lived in exile for almost 20 years.
- 1877 - The great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse is fatally bayoneted at age 36 by a soldier at Fort Robinson, Nebraska.
- 1878 - Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman and Clay Allison, four of the West's most famous gunmen, meet in Dodge City, Kansas.
- 1905 - The Russian-Japanese War ends as representatives of the combating empires, meeting in New Hampshire, sign the Treaty of Portsmouth. Japan achieves virtually all of its original war aims.
- 1910 - Marie Curie demonstrates the transformation of radium ore to metal at the Academy of Sciences in France.
- 1944 - Germany launches its first V-2 missile at Paris, France.
- 1958 - Martin Luther King is arrested in an Alabama protest for loitering and fined $14 for refusing to obey police.
- 1960 - Leopold Sedar Sengingor, poet and politician, is elected president of Senegal, Africa.
- 1975 - President Gerald Ford evades an assassination attempt in Sacramento, California.
05 September Birthdays
- 1568 - Tommasso Campanella, Italian philosopher and poet, who wrote City of the Sun.
- 1638 - Louis XIV, "The Sun King" of France who built the palace at Versailles.
- 1842 - Jesse James, legendary outlaw of the American West.
- 1897 - A.C. Nielson, founder of the Nielson Ratings.
- 1905 - Arthur Koestler, Hungarian novelist and essayist who wrote about communism in Darkness at Noon and The Ghost in the Machine.
- 1912 - John Cage, inventive composer, writer, philosopher, and artist.
- 1950 - Cathy Guisewite, cartoonist, creator of Cathy.