What Happened on September 21st in History

The Holocaust in Ukraine: On the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, Nazis send over 1,000 Jews of Pidhaitsi to Bełżec extermination camp.

The Holocaust saw the systematic mass murder of Jews in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, the Crimean General Government and some areas which were located to the east of...

The Holocaust in Ukraine: In Dunaivtsi, Ukraine, Nazis murder 2,588 Jews.

Dunaivtsi is a city in Kamianets-Podilskyi Raion, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine. It is located on the river Ternavka, 22 km away from the railway station Dunaivtsi and 68 km from the Khmelnytskyi....

The Holocaust in Poland: At the end of Yom Kippur, Germans order Jews to permanently move from Konstantynów to Biała Podlaska.

The Holocaust saw the ghettoization, robbery, deportation and mass murder of Jews in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany. Over three million Polish Jews were murdered, primarily at the Chełmno, Belzec,...

Lieutenant No Kum-sok, a North Korean pilot, defects to South Korea with his jet fighter.

No Kum-sok was a North Korean–born American engineer and aviator who served as a senior lieutenant in the Korean People's Army Air and Anti-Air Force during the Korean War. Under colonial rule, No...

Pamir, a four-masted barque, was shipwrecked and sank off the Azores during Hurricane Carrie.

Pamir was a four-masted barque built for the German shipping company F. Laeisz. One of their famous Flying P-Liners, named after the Pamir Mountains, she was the last commercial sailing ship to...

Malta gains independence from the United Kingdom, but remains in the Commonwealth.

Malta, officially the Republic of Malta, is an island country in Southern Europe located in the Mediterranean Sea, between Sicily and North Africa. It consists of an archipelago 80 km (50 mi) south...

The North American XB-70 Valkyrie, the world's fastest bomber, makes its maiden flight from Palmdale, California.

The North American Aviation XB-70 Valkyrie is a retired prototype version of the planned B-70 nuclear-armed, deep-penetration supersonic strategic bomber for the United States Air Force Strategic...

The Gambia, Maldives and Singapore are admitted as members of the United Nations.

The Gambia, officially the Republic of The Gambia, is a country in West Africa. Geographically, the Gambia is the smallest country in continental Africa; it is bounded by Senegal on all sides except...

Mexicana de Aviación Flight 801, a Boeing 727-100 passenger plane, crashes during a landing attempt in Mexico City, killing 27 of the 118 occupants.

Mexicana de Aviación Flight 801 was a scheduled international flight from Chicago-O'Hare International Airport in Illinois bound for Mexico City International Airport, Mexico City. On September 21,...

Bahrain, Bhutan and Qatar join the United Nations.

Bahrain, officially the Kingdom of Bahrain, is an island country in West Asia. Situated near the western shore of the Persian Gulf, the country comprises a small archipelago of 33 natural islands...

Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos begins authoritarian rule by declaring martial law.

Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos Sr. was a Filipino lawyer, dictator, and kleptocrat who served as the tenth president of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. From 1972 to 1981, Marcos ruled the...

Orlando Letelier is assassinated in Washington, D.C., at the order of Augusto Pinochet.

Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar was a Chilean Marxist and diplomat during the presidency of Salvador Allende. A member of the Socialist Party of Chile, he fled from the military dictatorship of...

Seychelles joins the United Nations.

Seychelles, officially the Republic of Seychelles, is an archipelagic country consisting of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean. Its capital and largest city, Victoria, is 1,500 kilometres east of...

Belize is granted full independence from the United Kingdom.

Belize is a country on the north-eastern coast of Central America. It is bordered by Mexico to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Guatemala to the west and south. It also shares a...

Sandra Day O'Connor is unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate as the first female Supreme Court justice.

Sandra Day O'Connor was an American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. Nominated by President Ronald...

Brunei joins the United Nations.

Brunei, officially Brunei Darussalam, is a country in Southeast Asia, situated on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. Apart from its coastline on the South China Sea, it is completely...

Armenia gains independence from the Soviet Union.

Armenia, officially the Republic of Armenia, is a landlocked country in the Armenian highlands of West Asia. It is a part of the Caucasus region and is bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia to the...

Russian president Boris Yeltsin triggers a constitutional crisis when he suspends parliament and scraps the constitution.

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as President of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1961 to...

A Transair Georgian Airlines Tu-134 is shot down by a missile in the Black Sea near Sokhumi, Georgia.

From 20 to 23 September 1993, during the Sukhumi massacre, separatists in Sukhumi, Abkhazia blocked Georgian troops' overland supply routes as part of the war in Abkhazia. In response, the Georgian...

The Defense of Marriage Act is passed by the United States Congress.

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was a United States federal law passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on September 21, 1996. It banned federal...

St. Olaf's Church, a stone church from the 16th century in Tyrvää, Finland, is burnt down by a burglar.

St. Olaf's Church in Tyrvää is a late medieval fieldstone church in Tyrvää, Sastamala, Finland. It is located on the shore of lake Rautavesi. The church was built approximately in 1510–1516 and...

The 7.7-magnitude Chi-Chi earthquake strikes central Taiwan, killing 2,400 people.

The Chi-Chi earthquake, was a 7.3 ML or 7.7 Mw earthquake which occurred in Jiji (Chi-Chi), Nantou County, Taiwan on September 21, 1999, at 01:47:12 local time. 2,415 people were killed, 11,305...

America: A Tribute to Heroes is broadcast by over 35 network and cable channels, raising over $200 million for the victims of the September 11 attacks.

America: A Tribute to Heroes was a benefit concert created by the heads of the four major American broadcast networks; Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS. Joel Gallen was selected by them to produce and run the...

Ross Parker is murdered in Peterborough, England, by a gang of ten British Pakistani youths.

Ross Andrew Parker, from Peterborough, England, was a seventeen-year-old white English male murdered in an unprovoked racially motivated crime. He bled to death after being stabbed, beaten with a...

The Galileo spacecraft is terminated by sending it into Jupiter's atmosphere.

Galileo was an American robotic space probe that studied the planet Jupiter and its moons, as well as the asteroids Gaspra and Ida. Named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, it consisted...

Three Egyptian militants open fire on a group of Israeli soldiers in a southern Israel cross-border attack.

Egyptians are an ethnic group native to the Nile Valley in Egypt. Egyptian identity is closely tied to geography. The population is concentrated in the Nile Valley, a small strip of cultivable land...

Al-Shabaab Islamic militants attack the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya, killing at least 67 people.

Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, simply known as Al-Shabaab, is a Sunni Islamist political and militant organization based in Somalia. It is involved in the ongoing Somali Civil War and controls...

Adventist Health System agreed to pay $118.7 million to settle allegations of fraud. It was the largest a hospital network has ever paid.

Adventist Health System Sunbelt Healthcare Corporation is an American hospital network headquartered in Altamonte Springs, Florida, that operates health care facilities across multiple states in the...

LGBT rights activist Zak Kostopoulos is beaten to death on a busy street in Athens

Zacharias "Zak" Kostopoulos was a Greek-American activist, defending the rights of LGBT people, HIV-positive people, sex workers, and refugees. He worked as a drag performer under the stage name...

A 5.6 Mw earthquake shakes the Albanian port of Durrës. Forty-nine people are injured in the capital, Tirana.

On 26 November 2019 at 03:54 CET (UTC+1), northwestern Albania was struck by a magnitude 6.4 earthquake with an epicentre 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) west-southwest of Mamurras. The earthquake lasted at...