September 15
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1835
Darwin visits the Galapagos Islands
On this day, 26-year-old naturalist Charles Darwin arrived in the Galapagos Islands aboard HMS Beagle. His observations and specimens of the unique assortment of plants and animals on the isolated island chain would help shape the ideas he eventually presented in On the Origin of Species, transforming our understanding of how life evolves.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
On this day in 1821, Central American notables accepted a plan drafted by the Mexican caudillo Agustín de Iturbide that brought independence from Spain to Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. [Test your knowledge of Latin American history.]
Featured Biography
Featured Biography
UPI/Bettmann Archive
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
English novelist and playwright Agatha Christie, born this day in 1890, was a master of the detective story whose books sold more than 100 million copies and were translated into some 100 languages.
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© William L. Rukeyser—Hulton Archive/Getty images
2025
A former British army paratrooper was put on trial for murder and attempted murder of demonstrators during the Bloody Sunday protests in Londonderry (Derry) in 1972.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
2004
Guitarist Johnny Ramone—who cofounded the Ramones, an American band that influenced the rise of punk rock on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean—died at age 55. [Take our quiz about musical groups.]
© B. Lenoir/Shutterstock.com
1984
Prince Harry—the younger son of Charles, prince of Wales, and Diana, princess of Wales—was born in London. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about English royalty.]
© PL Gould/Images Press—Archive Photos/Getty Images
1978
Muhammad Ali won the world heavyweight boxing championship for the third time with his victory over Leon Spinks. [How much do you know about boxing?]
Thomas J. O'Halloran—U.S. News and World Report Magazine Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file number. ppmsca-04298 -6A)
1963
Members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the predominantly African American 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls and injuring 14 people. [Read a timeline of the American civil rights movement.]
NARA
1950
United Nations troops landed at Inchon (now Incheon) in South Korea, crippling a North Korean invasion during the Korean War. [Explore a timeline of the Korean War.]
American Broadcasting Company
1949
The Lone Ranger, originally a radio series, debuted on television, with Clayton Moore as the renegade lawman and Jay Silverheels as Tonto.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org
1935
The Nürnberg Laws, among the first pieces of racist Nazi legislation that would culminate in the Holocaust, were passed in Germany; designed by Adolf Hitler, they deprived Jews of German citizenship and forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “citizens of German or kindred blood.”
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1916
The tank was used for the first time in combat, by the British in the First Battle of the Somme during World War I. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about World War I.]
© Universal History Archive—Universal Images Group/Getty Images
1915
Iconoclastic intellectual revolutionary Chen Duxiu founded “New Youth” (Xinqingnian) magazine in Shanghai, which became an influential forum for the intellectual and cultural changes that culminated in China’s May Fourth Movement.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1959, JP3177a-f, www.metmuseum.org
1894
Japan defeated Qing China at the Battle of Pyongyang during the First Sino-Japanese War, a decisive victory that weakened Chinese influence in Korea.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
1862
During the American Civil War, Confederates under General Stonewall Jackson captured Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), and took more than 12,500 prisoners, the largest Union surrender in the war. [How much do you know about the American Civil War?]
Alinari/Art Resource, New York
1590
Giambattista Castagna was elected pope as Urban VII; he died of malaria 12 days later, the shortest papal reign in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. [Take our pope quiz.]