Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 September 11

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Benedict Arnold

Benedict Arnold led an expedition early in the American Revolutionary War from Cambridge, Massachusetts, through the wilderness of what is now Maine to the gates of Quebec City, setting out on September 11, 1775. Colonel Arnold's force of 1,100 Continental Army troops was part of a two-pronged invasion of the British Province of Quebec, along with Richard Montgomery's expedition pushing north from Lake Champlain. By the time Arnold reached the French settlements above the Saint Lawrence River in November, his force was reduced to 600 starving men. They had traveled about 350 miles (560 km) through poorly charted wilderness, twice the distance they had expected to cover. Assisted by the local French-speaking Canadiens, Arnold's troops crossed the Saint Lawrence on November 13 and 14 and attempted to put Quebec City under siege. Failing in this, they withdrew until Montgomery arrived to lead an unsuccessful attack on the city. Arnold received a promotion to brigadier general. His route through northern Maine has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Arnold Trail to Quebec. (Full article...)

Part of the Canadian campaign of 1775 series, one of Wikipedia's featured topics.

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Opera house in Chemnitz

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Hurricane Irma

Hurricane Irma (satellite image pictured) makes landfall in Florida killing at least 4 people, having killed at least 25 people in the Caribbean.
A magnitude 8.1 earthquake strikes Guatemala and Mexico, killing more than 90 people.
Monsoon flooding kills nearly 1,300 people and affects 45 million others in India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh.
North Korea conducts its sixth nuclear test.
The European X-ray free-electron laser is inaugurated in Hamburg, Germany.

September 11: Patriot Day in the United States

Portrait of Gabriel Fauré by John Singer Sargent

1226 – The Catholic practice of Eucharistic adoration among lay people formally began in Avignon, France.
1649 – Cromwellian conquest of Ireland: Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army ended the Siege of Drogheda, took over the town and massacred its garrison.
1924 – French composer Gabriel Fauré (pictured) finished his last piece, a string quartet, before dying two months later.
1992 – The eye of Hurricane Iniki, the most powerful hurricane to strike the state of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Islands in recorded history, passed directly over the island of Kauai, killing six people and causing around US$1.8 billion dollars in damage.
2001 – Al-Qaeda used four hijacked passenger airliners to carry out a series of suicide attacks against targets in New York City and the Washington, D.C., area.

Joseph Nicollet (d. 1843) · Jan Smuts (d. 1950) · Susi Kentikian (b. 1987)

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Viv Richards

Twenty-five centuries were scored in World Series Cricket (WSC) Supertests, and two in international one-day matches. WSC was a professional cricket competition established by Kerry Packer which ran from 1977 and 1979. The International Cricket Conference barred the WSC from using the term "Test matches", or naming a team "Australia". As a result, the matches were dubbed "Supertests", while the teams were WSC Australia XI, WSC West Indies XI and WSC World XI. The first Supertest began on 2 December 1977, although the first century (100 or more runs in a single innings) was not scored until the third match, in which Ian Chappell accumulated 141 runs in the first innings. Bruce Laird and Viv Richards (pictured) went on to score centuries in the same match. A month later, Barry Richards achieved the competition's first double century, scoring 207 runs for the WSC World XI. Greg Chappell had a record five WSC centuries. (Full list...)

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Francis S. Thayer (1822–1880) was an American merchant and politician from New York. He served as a member of the New York State Senate from 1868 to 1871. He was the sole member of the Republican Party to vote against the Tweed Charter, through which Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall William M. Tweed consolidated power among his political allies.

Photograph: Charles Burt; restoration: Andrew Shiva

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