GOOD MORNING – TODAY IS MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 01, the 244th day of 2014 with 121 to follow. Today is Labor Day in the United States. Sunrise in the Boston area is @ 6:08 and sunset is @ 7:20. The moon is waxing. The morning stars are stars are Jupiter, Uranus & Venus. The evening stars are Mars, Mercury, Neptune & Saturn.
ON THIS DAY IN: 1661 – First yacht race took place; participants were England’s King Charles versus his brother, James.
1676 – Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising at Jamestown, Virginia, in which the settlement was burned down.
1773 – Phillis Wheatley’s “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” was published, making her the first African-American poet to be published.
1807 – Former Vice President Aaron Burr was acquitted on charges of plotting to annex territory in Louisiana and Missouri to establish an independent republic.
1821 – William Becknell took a group of traders from Independence, Missouri, toward Santa Fe, blazing the Santa Fe Trail.
1836 – Marcus Whitman and wife Narcissa established the first American settlement in northernOregon Territory. Narcissa was one of the first white women to travel the Oregon Trail.
1859 – First Pullman sleeping car was put into service.
1864 – Confederate forces, led by General John Bell Hood, evacuated Atlanta, anticipating the arrival of Union General William T. Sherman’s troops.
1865 – Joseph Lister performed first surgery using antiseptics.
1870 – The Prussians defeated the French at Sedan in the last battle of the Franco-Prussian War.
1878 – Emma Nutt of Boston became the first female telephone operator.
1882 – The first Labor Day was observed in New York City by the Carpenters and Joiners Union.
1890 – First baseball tripleheader was played: Boston vs Pittsburgh.
1894 – Labor Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress.
1904 – Helen Keller graduated with honors from Radcliffe College.
1905 – Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces of Canada.
1914 – St. Petersburg, Russia changed its name to Petrograd.
1916 – Bulgaria declared war on Rumania, expanding the World War I.
1923 – The Kanto earthquake leveled Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan, killing 300,000.
1939 – Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II in Europe.
1939 – “Physical Review” published first article describing black holes.
1941 – Yellow star became obligatory wear for Jews under the Third Reich.
1945 – Japan surrendered to the United States, ending World War II. (Japan’s date is 9/2.)
1969 – Moammar Gadhafi deposed King Idris in the Libyan revolution.
1970 – Dr. Hugh Scott of Washington, D.C. became the first African-American superintendent of schools of a major American city.
1971 – Qatar declared independence from Great Britain.
1972 – Bobby Fischer of the United States defeated Boris Spassky of Russia for the world chess title.
1976 – Representative Wayne L. Hayes (D-Ohio) resigned because of scandal with Elizabeth Ray.
1983 – Korean Airlines Flight 007, flying from New York to Seoul, was shot down by the Soviets after it strayed into restricted airspace over Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan. All 269 people aboard were killed, including 61 Americans, among them U.S. Representative Larry McDonald.
1985 – Seventy-three years after it sunk in the North Atlantic, the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanicwas found by a US-French expedition; it was four hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
1991 – Uzbekistan declares independence from the Soviet Union.
2004 – Prosecutors in Colorado dropped a sexual assault charge against basketball star Kobe Bryant.
2005 – Seven members and former members of the AFL-CIO form a new trade union organization, the Change to Win Federation.