Ever-When
On this day

What happened on 12 September?

12 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

  1. 490 BCE Battle of Marathon Athenian and Plataean hoplites defeat Darius I's Persian invasion force on the plain of Marathon.
  2. 1683 Battle of Vienna (1683) Polish-Imperial relief force under Jan Sobieski crushes the Ottoman besieging army outside Vienna; conventional end of crusading-era European-Ottoman warfare.
  3. 1683 The charge from the Kahlenberg At dawn the relief army — Poles, Austrians, Bavarians, Saxons under King Jan Sobieski — comes down out of the Vienna Woods, and at evening Sobieski launches some 18,000 horsemen, h
  4. 1958 Integrated circuit invented Kilby and Noyce independently create the IC, kernel of all later computing.
  5. 1913 Born: Jesse Owens African-American athlete; won 4 gold medals at Berlin 1936.
  6. 1962 Kennedy's 'We choose to go to the Moon' speech To 40,000 people baking in a Texas stadium, Kennedy makes the case for a Moon landing that has no strategic necessity — 'not because they are easy, but because they are hard'. It i
  7. 1919 Hitler joins the German Workers' Party Sent by army intelligence to spy on a fringe party of a few dozen in a Munich beer hall, a thirty-year-old corporal argues from the floor, is invited to join — member number 555, t
  8. 1977 Steve Biko killed in detention The anti-apartheid Black Consciousness leader dies after police beatings, becoming a martyr of the South African struggle.
  9. 1980 1980 Turkish coup General Kenan Evren seizes power amid political violence, imposing military rule and a new constitution.
  10. 1948 The Liaoshen Campaign takes Manchuria The first of the three decisive campaigns: in seven weeks Lin Biao's armies take all of Manchuria and destroy half a million Nationalist troops, many of them Chiang's best American
  11. 1974 Ethiopian Revolution The Derg deposes Emperor Haile Selassie, ending a 3,000-year monarchy and installing a Marxist military junta.
  12. 1919 D'Annunzio seizes Fiume Gabriele D'Annunzio and two thousand legionaries occupy the disputed Adriatic port of Fiume in defiance of the Paris peace settlement, running it for fifteen months as a dress rehe
Every event here sits on an interactive timeline of all of history — zoom from the Big Bang to today, side by side across countries and themes. Explore Ever-When · All timelines