On September 1

Hurricane Dorian, the most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record outside the tropics, made landfall in the Bahamas at Category 5 intensity.

Speakers' Corner, a free speech area in Hong Lim Park in Singapore, was launched.

A Soviet jet interceptor shot down the civilian Korean Air Lines Flight 007 near the island of Sakhalin in the north Pacific, killing all 246 passengers and 23 crew on board.

A 76-hour multinational rescue effort in the Irish Sea resulted in the deepest sub rescue in history (pictured).

In a match widely publicized as a Cold War confrontation, American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer became the 11th World Chess Champion with his victory over Soviet Boris Spassky.

Muammar Gaddafi (pictured) led a coup d'état to overthrow King Idris of Libya.

At an Arab League summit, eight nations issued the Khartoum Resolution, declaring that there would be "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, [and] no negotiations with it".

Rioting erupted in Dayton, Ohio, resulting in one death and the mobilization of the Ohio National Guard.

Channel 11 began television broadcasts in Minneapolis, United States.

Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea, which later won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was first published.

German forces attacked multiple locations in Poland, including Wieluń and Westerplatte, starting World War II in Europe.

The first group of around 172,000 Koreans were deported by Soviet authorities from the Russian Far East to the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs; around 10 to 25 percent died.

The passenger pigeon, which once numbered in the billions, became extinct when the last individual died in captivity.

Construction began on the Saline Valley salt tram, which during its operation was the steepest tram in the United States.

The first science fiction film, titled A Trip to the Moon and based on From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, was released in France.

A small British force commanded by a surgeon fought off a surprise attack by the Maya on Orange Walk Town, British Honduras.

American Civil War: Confederate forces attacked retreating troops (map shown) of the Union Army during a rainstorm in Chantilly, Virginia, but the battle ended inconclusively.

A powerful solar flare caused a coronal mass ejection that struck Earth a few hours later, generating the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded and causing bright aurorae visible in the middle latitudes.

German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding discovered one of the largest main-belt asteroids, naming it Juno after the Roman goddess.

Under orders from Governor Thomas Gage, British soldiers removed gunpowder from a magazine in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which caused Patriots to prepare for war.