Today in History: Sept. 22

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480 BC – Battle of Salamis: The Greek fleet under Themistocles defeats the Persian fleet under Xerxes I. 904 – The warlord Zhu Quanzhong kills Emperor Zhaozong, the penultimate emperor of the Tang dynasty, after seizing control of the imperial government. 1236 – The Lithuanians and Semigallians defeat the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in the Battle of Saule. 1499 – Treaty of Basel concludes the Swabian War. 1586 – Battle of Zutphen: Spanish victory over the English and Dutch. 1598 – English playwright Ben Jonson kills actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel and is indicted for manslaughter. 1692 – The last of those convicted of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials are hanged; the remainder of those convicted are all eventually released. 1711 – The Tuscarora War begins in present-day North Carolina. 1761 – George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz are crowned King and Queen, respectively, of the Kingdom of Great Britain. 1776 – Nathan Hale is hanged for spying during American Revolution. 1789 – The office of United States Postmaster General is established. 1789 – Battle of Rymnik establishes Alexander Suvorov as a pre-eminent Russian military commander after his allied army defeat superior Ottoman Empire forces. 1792 – Primidi Vendémiaire of year one of the French Republican Calendar as the French First Republic comes into being. 1823 – Joseph Smith states he found the Golden plates on this date after being directed by God through the Angel Moroni to the place where they were buried. 1857 – The Russian warship Lefort capsizes and sinks during a storm in the Gulf of Finland, killing all 826 aboard. 1862 – Slavery in the United States: A preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation is released. 1866 – Battle of Curupayty in the Paraguayan War. 1885 – Lord Randolph Churchill makes a speech in Ulster in opposition to Home Rule. 1888 – The first issue of National Geographic Magazine is published. 1892 – Lindal Railway Incident, providing inspiration for "The Lost Special" by A.C. Doyle and the TV serial Lost. 1896 – Queen Victoria surpasses her grandfather King George III as the longest reigning monarch in British history. 1908 – The Bulgarian Declaration of Independence is proclaimed. 1910 – The Duke of York's Picture House opens in Brighton, now the oldest continually operating cinema in Britain. 1914 – German submarine SM U-9 torpedoes and sinks the British cruisers HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy on the Broad Fourteens off the Dutch coast with the loss of over 1,400 men. 1919 – The steel strike of 1919, led by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, begins in Pennsylvania before spreading across the United States. 1927 – Jack Dempsey loses the "Long Count" boxing match to Gene Tunney. 1934 – An explosion takes place at Gresford Colliery in Wales, leading to the deaths of 266 miners and rescuers. 1937 – Spanish Civil War: Peña Blanca is taken, ending the Battle of El Mazuco. 1939 – Joint victory parade of Wehrmacht and Red Army in Brest-Litovsk at the end of the Invasion of Poland. 1941 – World War II: On Jewish New Year Day, the German SS murder 6,000 Jews in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. Those are the survivors of the previous killings that took place a few days earlier in which about 24,000 Jews were executed. 1955 – In the United Kingdom, the television channel ITV goes live for the first time. 1957 – In Haiti, François Duvalier is elected president. 1960 – The Sudanese Republic is renamed Mali after the withdrawal of Senegal from the Mali Federation. 1965 – The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 (also known as the Second Kashmir War) between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, ends after the UN calls for a ceasefire. 1970 – The Spanish Inquisition unexpectedly appear on Monty Python's Flying Circus. 1975 – Sara Jane Moore tries to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford, but is foiled by Oliver Sipple. 1979 – The Vela Incident (also known as the South Atlantic Flash) is observed near Bouvet Island, thought to be a nuclear weapons test. 1980 – Iraq invades Iran. 1989 - Hurricane Hugo touches down in South Carolina, causing more than $1 billion in devastation. 1991 – The Dead Sea Scrolls are made available to the public for the first time by the Huntington Library. 1993 – A barge strikes a railroad bridge near Mobile, Alabama, causing the deadliest train wreck in Amtrak history. Forty-seven passengers are killed. 1993 – A Transair Georgian Airlines Tu-154 is shot down by a missile in Sukhumi, Georgia. 1995 – An E-3B AWACS crashes outside Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska after multiple bird strikes to two of the four engines soon after takeoff; all 24 on board are killed. 1995 – Nagerkovil school bombing, is carried out by the Sri Lanka Air Force in which at least 34 die, most of them ethnic Tamil schoolchildren. 2013 – At least 75 people are killed in a suicide bombing at a church in Peshawar, Pakistan.