September 10

1570 – Spanish Jesuit missionaries land in present day Virginia to establish a mission to the local indian tribes.

1607 – Edward Wingfield is ousted as first president of the governing council of the Colony of Virginia; he is replaced by John Ratcliffe.

1608 – John Smith is elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia.

1776 – One of the members of Knowlton’s Rangers, Captain Nathan Hale, volunteers to stay behind the lines to spy on the British in New York City, after the Continental Army is forced to retreat from lower Manhattan.

1813 – A U.S. Navy fleet defeats a British fleet at the Battle of Lake Erie. The U.S. commander, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, sends the message of victory: “We have met the enemy and they are ours…..”

1833 – President Andrew Jackson shuts down the Second Bank of the U.S.

1846 – Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine.

1858 – George Mary Searle discovers the asteroid 55 Pandora while at the original Dudley Observatory near Albany, New York

1897 – A Luzerne County sheriff’s posse kills 19 UMW (United Mine Workers) Union immigrant miners while on a strike of the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company in Lattimer, Pennsylvania.

1932 – New York City Subway’s third competing subway system, the municipally-owned IND, is opened.

1939 – The Royal Australian Navy submarine HMS Oxley is mistakenly sunk by the Royal Navy submarine HMS Triton near Norway and becomes the Royal Navy’s first loss of a submarine in World War II.
Canada declares of war on Germany.

1977 – Hamida Djandoubi, convicted of torture and murder, is the last person to be executed by guillotine in France.

1979 – President Carter pardons 4 Puerto Rican nationalists for assaulting and wounding several Representatives while Congress was in session in 1954.

1991 – The Senate Judiciary Committee opens hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

2002 – Switzerland, traditionally a neutral country, becomes a full member of the United Nations.

2008 – The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, is powered up for the first time.

2017 – Hurricane Irma makes landfall on Cudjoe Key, Florida at Category 4 intensity after causing catastrophic damage throughout the Caribbean resulting in 134 deaths and $64.76 billion in damage.