1787The United States Constitution is signed in Philadelphia
Four years after winning independence, the United States was a loose league of thirteen states under the Articles of Confederation, with a Congress that could not raise taxes or regulate trade. In May 1787 delegates met in the State House in Philadelphia, now Independence Hall, to revise the Articles. Sitting behind closed doors through a hot summer, with George Washington in the chair, they instead wrote a wholly new frame of government, with a president, a two-chamber Congress and a supreme court.
On 17 September 1787 the finished document, four pages of parchment, was read aloud and signed. Benjamin Franklin, aged 81, urged every delegate to put aside his doubts; three of those present, Edmund Randolph, George Mason and Elbridge Gerry, still refused. The Constitution carries 39 names. It then went to the states, and came into force once nine had ratified it, in June 1788. It is often described as the oldest written national constitution still in use, and Americans mark 17 September as Constitution Day and Citizenship Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Archives: Constitution of the United States (1787) ↗
1862The Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day of the American Civil War
In September 1862, after a run of victories in Virginia, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee led his army across the Potomac into Maryland, the first invasion of the North. He hoped that a victory on Union soil would bring recognition from Britain and France. The Union Army of the Potomac under George McClellan followed him, helped by a lost copy of Lee’s orders found wrapped around three cigars, and the two armies met beside Antietam Creek near the town of Sharpsburg.
The battle on 17 September 1862 was fought in three stages from dawn to dusk: in a cornfield to the north, along a sunken farm road remembered as Bloody Lane, and at a stone bridge over the creek. By nightfall about 23,000 men had been killed, wounded or were missing, the heaviest loss of any single day in American history. Neither side had broken the other, but Lee withdrew into Virginia. Five days later President Abraham Lincoln used the result to announce the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Park Service: A short overview of the Battle of Antietam ↗
1944Allied paratroops drop into the Netherlands in Operation Market Garden
By September 1944 the Allied armies had swept across France and Belgium, but their supply lines were stretched and the advance was slowing. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery proposed a bold stroke to end the war by Christmas: airborne troops would seize a chain of bridges across the rivers and canals of the Netherlands, and tanks of the British XXX Corps would drive up a single road to cross the Rhine at Arnhem and turn into Germany.
On the afternoon of Sunday 17 September 1944 thousands of parachutists and glider troops landed in the largest airborne operation yet attempted. The Americans took most of their bridges near Eindhoven and Nijmegen, but the British 1st Airborne Division, landed several miles from Arnhem, met unexpected German armour. One battalion reached the bridge and held its northern end for days; the tanks never arrived. The survivors withdrew across the river on the night of 25 September. Only about a quarter of the men who landed at Arnhem got back, and the Rhine was not crossed until March 1945.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Army Museum: Operation Market Garden ↗
1978Egypt and Israel sign the Camp David Accords
Egypt and Israel had fought four wars in thirty years when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt astonished the world by flying to Jerusalem in November 1977. The talks that followed soon stalled, and the American president Jimmy Carter invited Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the hills of Maryland. For thirteen days the three men and their advisers bargained in seclusion, with Carter carrying drafts between two leaders who at times would not meet.
On the evening of 17 September 1978 they returned to Washington and signed two agreements at the White House. One set out a framework for peace between Egypt and Israel, including Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula; the other proposed a path to self-government for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, which was never carried out. Sadat and Begin shared that year’s Nobel Peace Prize, and in March 1979 they signed the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Office of the Historian: Camp David Accords and the Arab-Israeli peace process ↗
