September 13th: Duels, Discoveries and Unexpected Legends

On September thirteenth, 1859, a sitting United States senator was shot and killed in a duel. Yesterday we talked about surprising discoveries, how a dog's lucky stumble could reveal fifteen thousand years of history in a cave. Well, today’s date is packed with moments that began as one thing, and ended up as something else ENTIRELY — sometimes tragically, sometimes gloriously, and sometimes... with a plumber in blue overalls. The senator was David Broderick of California. The man who shot him was David Terry, the former chief justice of the California Supreme Court. This wasn't some back-alley brawl. This was a formal affair, a pre-arranged meeting on the shores of Lake Merced, just south of San Francisco, to settle a political dispute with pistols.

Broderick was fiercely anti-slavery. Terry was a leader of the pro-slavery faction in the state. Their feud had simmered for years, fueled by newspaper editorials and public insults, until finally, Terry challenged Broderick to a duel. It was, in the grim language of the day, a matter of honor. The first attempt was a false start, interrupted by the police. But they were determined. They met again two days later, on this day, September thirteenth. Ten paces. Broderick’s pistol discharged prematurely, the bullet hitting the ground just a few feet in front of him. Terry took his time. He aimed. He fired. The bullet struck Broderick in the chest. He lingered for three days before dying, becoming the first and ONLY sitting U.S.

senator to be killed in a duel. It's a shocking story. It feels like something from a different universe, not just a different century. The idea of political disputes being settled by lethal combat... it’s both horrifying and a stark reminder of how raw and violent the passions of a nation on the brink of Civil War truly were. Now, jump forward one hundred and twelve years, to September thirteenth, 1971. Another story of violence, but this one is uglier, messier, and tells a very different story about power and the state. This is the day the Attica Prison riot ended. For four days, about thirteen hundred inmates at the maximum-security prison in upstate New York had held the facility, taking dozens of guards and civilian employees hostage.

Their demands were not for escape. They were for basic human dignity. They wanted better living conditions, fairer rules, more religious freedom, and an end to the brutality they faced daily. They were organized. They were articulate. They were trying to negotiate. But negotiations broke down. Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused to meet with the inmates in person. And on the morning of the thirteenth, he ordered state police to retake the prison by force. What followed was chaos. Hundreds of officers stormed the prison yard, dropping tear gas from helicopters and opening fire with shotguns and rifles. The official story, at first, was that the inmates had killed the hostages.

That was a lie. Autopsies later proved that every single hostage who died in the raid was killed by the gunfire of the state troopers. In the end, thirty-nine people were dead. Twenty-nine prisoners and ten hostages. The assault was a brutal, overwhelming display of force, and it left a deep scar on the American conscience. Looking back, the duel of Senator Broderick and the storming of Attica feel like two poles of American violence. One, a ritualized, almost aristocratic conflict between two powerful men. The other, a chaotic, indiscriminate suppression of the powerless by the state. Both happened on this date. Both force us to ask who gets to have their grievances heard, and whose lives are considered disposable.

The questions raised in the yard at Attica in 1971 about prison reform and human rights... they haven't gone away. They are as loud today as they were then. But this date isn't only about violence. It's also a date of astonishing, world-changing hope. Let's go to September thirteenth, 1993. The South Lawn of the White House. It’s a sunny day. Three thousand people are gathered. And on a small stage, two men who have been lifelong enemies are about to do the unthinkable. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin — the old general, the war hero — extends his hand. And Yasser Arafat — the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the revolutionary in the checkered keffiyeh — takes it.

They shake hands. Oh, if you were alive then, you remember this moment. It was electric. It was a symbol so powerful it felt like it could bend history. The Oslo Accords, a framework for peace, had been signed. And this handshake was the seal. It was a public declaration that decades of war and hatred could, perhaps, finally give way to negotiation and recognition. For a moment, it felt like peace in the Middle East wasn't just a dream, but a real, tangible possibility. Of course, looking back now, we know how fragile that moment was. We know the peace process would falter. We know Rabin would be assassinated by an Israeli extremist just two years later.

We know the conflict remains a raw, open wound. It’s easy to look at the Oslo Accords now and see them as a failure. But to do that is to miss the point of that day. It wasn't about a final, perfect solution. It was about the courage to take the first step. It was proof that even the most bitter enemies could choose to see the humanity in each other, even if only for a moment. That handshake doesn't represent a failed peace. It represents the breathtaking possibility of it. And that hope, however battered, is something worth remembering. Hope, of course, comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s a global peace accord. And sometimes... it's a pink Cadillac.

On this day in 1963, a woman named Mary Kay Ash took her life savings — five thousand dollars — and launched a cosmetics company from a small storefront in Dallas, Texas. She had just quit her job in direct sales after, yet again, seeing a man she had trained get promoted above her for twice her salary. She was in her mid-forties. She decided that if she couldn't find a company that valued women, she would build one herself. With the help of her twenty-year-old son, she started Mary Kay Inc. The plan was simple: create quality products and give women a chance to run their own businesses, to control their own income, to achieve success on their own terms.

And it WORKED. My goodness, did it work. That five-thousand-dollar investment grew into a multi-billion-dollar global empire. It created a path to financial independence for millions of women, symbolized by those famous pink Cadillacs awarded to top sellers. Mary Kay Ash didn't just sell lipstick. She sold possibility. She built an empire on the radical idea that women's ambition was a resource to be celebrated, not suppressed. And she’s not the only creator of empires born on this day. September thirteenth is also the birthday of Milton Hershey, born in 1857. The man who didn't just make chocolate; he made HERSHEY'S chocolate. He built a town for his workers, a model of industrial paternalism, and created a brand that became synonymous with American childhood.

And then there's Roald Dahl. Born in 1916. The man who gave us Willy Wonka and James's giant peach, the BFG and Matilda. Dahl understood something fundamental about stories, and about children. He knew, as one writer put it, that "kids rarely want their tales sanitized." He embraced the grotesque, the mischievous, the slightly dangerous. His worlds were full of magic and wonder, but also greedy children getting their just deserts and terrifying adults getting outsmarted. He didn't talk down to his readers. He invited them into a world that was more thrilling, and honestly, more true, than the perfectly tidy stories they were often fed. Think about it.

Mary Kay Ash, Milton Hershey, Roald Dahl. Three people, all sharing this date, who built entire worlds. Worlds of entrepreneurial spirit, of chocolatey delight, of fantastically imaginative stories. They remind us that an empire doesn't have to be built with armies. It can be built with a business plan, a chocolate bar, or a really good book. But there is one more world, created on this day, that might just eclipse them all. We have to go to Japan. The year is 1985. September thirteenth. A company called Nintendo releases a game for its new Family Computer, or Famicom. The game is called Super Mario Bros. And with that, the world tilted on its axis.

A short, stout Italian plumber with a magnificent mustache runs and jumps his way through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue a princess from a giant turtle-dragon. It sounds absurd. And it is. It is gloriously, brilliantly absurd. But it was also a revolution. The side-scrolling action, the secret pipes, the power-up mushrooms... it defined a genre. It saved the home video game industry, which had crashed just a few years earlier. And it came with a soundtrack. You can hear it in your head right now, can't you? That cheerful, syncopated, 8-bit calypso. Da-da-da-da-da-DA-da... It is one of the most recognizable pieces of music on the planet. And here is the delightful, mind-bending connection that makes being a historian so much fun.

On the exact same date — September thirteenth — but one hundred and seventy-one years earlier, in 1814, another piece of iconic music was born. A lawyer and amateur poet named Francis Scott Key was being held on a British ship in Baltimore Harbor. All night, he watched as the British fleet bombarded Fort McHenry. He had no idea if the American fort had survived. But then, in the first light of dawn, he saw it. The American flag, enormous and defiant, was still flying. Overwhelmed, Key scribbled a poem on the back of a letter. He called it "The Defence of Fort M'Henry." We know it today as "The Star-Spangled Banner," the national anthem of the United States.

So on the very same calendar day, separated by nearly two centuries, we get two anthems. One, born from the fire and smoke of war, a symbol of national survival. The other, born from the silicon chips and digital dreams of peacetime, a symbol of global play. One is the soundtrack to a martial revolution, the other to a digital one. But both are about a kind of victory. One about a flag still waving over a fort, the other about a little hero finally reaching the flagpole at the end of the level. And I would argue that for millions of people around the world, the theme from Super Mario Bros. is just as foundational, just as universally understood, as any national anthem ever written.

So where does this all leave us? We have duels and riots. We have failed peace accords and successful businesses. We have chocolate kings and literary giants and a plumber who became a global icon. What's the thread that pulls all of this together? I think it’s a man named Phineas Gage. On September thirteenth, 1848, Gage was a twenty-five-year-old railroad foreman in Vermont. He was using a tamping iron — a three-and-a-half-foot-long, one-and-a-quarter-inch-thick iron rod — to pack explosive powder into a hole in a rock. A spark ignited the powder. The explosion drove the iron rod straight through his head. It entered under his left cheekbone, passed behind his left eye, and exited out the top of his skull, landing some eighty feet away.

Miraculously, Phineas Gage survived. He was conscious and talking within minutes. He walked away from the accident. But he wasn't the same. Before the accident, he was known as a capable, well-balanced, efficient foreman. After, his friends said he was "no longer Gage." He became profane, irreverent, and wildly impulsive. He couldn't hold a job. His personality had been fundamentally and permanently altered. His case became a landmark in the history of neuroscience. It was one of the first pieces of hard evidence that specific parts of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, were connected to personality and social behavior. It was the beginning of our scientific understanding that everything we are — our anger, our ambition, our creativity, our capacity for hope and for violence — resides in the physical matter of our brains.

And that, I think, is the secret of September thirteenth. The political fury of Senator Broderick, the desperation of the Attica inmates, the courageous hope of Rabin and Arafat, the creative genius of Roald Dahl, the entrepreneurial fire of Mary Kay Ash, the playful brilliance that gave us Mario... it all comes from that same three-pound organ that Phineas Gage’s accident so violently illuminated. History isn't just a list of dates and events. It's a record of the human mind at work, in all its terrifying, tragic, and utterly delightful complexity.