Sept. 22:

1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all enslaved people in Confederate states should be freed as of Jan. 1, 1863, if the states did not end the fighting and rejoin the Union.

1975, Sara Jane Moore fired two shots in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford outside a San Francisco hotel, missing Ford by inches.

1985, rock and country music artists participated in “Farm Aid,” a concert staged in Champaign, Illinois, to help the nation’s farmers.

2017, as the scale of the damage from Hurricane Maria started to become clearer, Puerto Rican officials said they could not contact more than half of the communities in the U.S. territory, where all power had been knocked out to the island’s 3.4 million people.

Sept. 23:

1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition returned to St. Louis, more than two years after setting out for the Pacific Northwest.

1952, Sen. Richard M. Nixon, R-Calif., salvaged his vice presidential nomination by appearing on television from Los Angeles to refute allegations of improper campaign fundraising in what became known as the “Checkers” speech for its reference to his family’s cocker spaniel.

2002, Gov. Gray Davis signed a law making California the first state to offer workers paid family leave.

2018, capping a comeback from four back surgeries, Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship in Atlanta, the 80th victory of his PGA Tour career and his first in more than five years.

Sept. 24:

1789, President George Washington signed a Judiciary Act establishing America’s federal court system and creating the post of attorney general.

1906, President Theodore Roosevelt established Devil’s Tower as the first U.S. national monument.

1988, Jackie Joyner-Kersey won gold and set a world record in the women’s heptathlon at the Summer Olympics in Seoul.

2017, more than 200 NFL players knelt or sat during the national anthem after President Donald Trump criticized the players’ protests in a speech and a series of tweets.

Sept. 25:

1789, the first United States Congress adopted 12 amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. (Ten of the amendments became the Bill of Rights.)

1957, nine Black students who had been forced to withdraw from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, because of unruly white crowds were escorted to class by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division and the National Guard.

2005, in the presence of disarmament observers, the Irish Republican Army decommissioned its arsenal of weapons, officially ending a 36-year armed campaign for a unified Irish state.

2018, Bill Cosby was sentenced to three-to-10 years in prison for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home. (After serving nearly three years, Cosby went free in June 2021 after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his conviction.)

Sept. 26:

1777, British troops occupied Philadelphia during the American Revolution

1960, the first-ever debate between presidential nominees took place as Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon faced off before a national TV audience from Chicago.

2005, Army Pfc. Lynndie England was convicted by a military jury in Fort Hood, Texas, on six of seven counts stemming from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

2022, the NASA spacecraft Dart rammed an asteroid at blistering speed in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock menaces Earth.

Sept. 27:

1779, John Adams was named by Congress to negotiate the Revolutionary War’s peace terms with Britain.

1964, the government publicly released the report of the Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.

1994, more than 350 Republican congressional candidates gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to sign the “Contract with America,” a 10-point platform they pledged to enact if voters sent a GOP majority to the House.

1996, in Afghanistan, the Taliban, a band of former seminary students, drove the government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani out of Kabul, captured the capital and executed former leader Najibullah.

Sept. 28:

1781, American forces in the Revolutionary War, backed by a French fleet, began their successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia.

1928, Scottish medical researcher Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first effective antibiotic.

1941, Ted Williams became the most recent American League baseball player to hit over .400 for a season, batting .406 for the Boston Red Sox.

2020, the worldwide death toll from the coronavirus pandemic reached 1 million, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University.

– Associated Press