Today is Sunday, Sept. 22, the 266th day of 2024. There are 100 days left in the year. Autumn begins at 8:43 a.m. EDT.
Today in history:
On Sept. 22, 1985, rock and country music artists participated in “Farm Aid,” a concert staged in Champaign, Illinois, to help the nation’s farmers.
Also on this date:
In 1776, during the Revolutionary War, Capt. Nathan Hale, 21, was hanged as a spy by the British in New York.
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all enslaved people in Confederate states should be freed as of Jan. 1, 1863, if the states did not end the fighting and rejoin the Union.
In 1957, Haitian women were allowed to vote for the first time, 153 years after Haiti became an independent country; François Duvalier was elected president.
In 1975, Sara Jane Moore fired two shots in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford outside a San Francisco hotel, missing Ford by inches.
In 1980, the Persian Gulf conflict between Iran and Iraq erupted into a full-scale war that would continue for nearly eight years.
In 1993, 47 people were killed when an Amtrak passenger train fell off a bridge and crashed into Big Bayou Canot near Mobile, Alabama.
In 2014, the United States and five Arab nations launched airstrikes against the Islamic State group in Syria, sending waves of planes and Tomahawk cruise missiles against an array of targets.
In 2017, as the scale of the damage from Hurricane Maria started to become clearer, Puerto Rican officials said they could not contact more than half of the communities in the U.S. territory, where all power had been knocked out to the island’s 3.4 million people.
Today’s Birthdays: Singer-choreographer-actor Toni Basil is 81. Musician King Sunny Adé is 78. Football Hall of Famer Harold Carmichael is 75. Rock singer David Coverdale (Deep Purple, Whitesnake) is 73. Actor Shari Belafonte is 70. Singer Debby Boone is 68. Country singer June Forester (The Forester Sisters) is 68. Singer Nick Cave is 67. Singer Andrea Bocelli is 66. Singer-musician Joan Jett is 66. Actor Scott Baio is 64. Actor Bonnie Hunt is 63. Actor Mireille Enos is 49. Soccer player Thiago Silva is 40. Actor Tatiana Maslany is 39. Actor Tom Felton is 37. Actor Teyonah Parris is 37. Olympic gold medal skateboarder Coco Yoshizawa is 15.
