September 6 in History: From Piggly Wiggly to World-Changing Moments

On September sixth, 1916, a store called Piggly Wiggly opened its doors in Memphis, Tennessee, and in doing so, it completely, irrevocably changed the way you buy food. Yesterday we talked about the shock and trauma of the 1972 Munich hostage crisis, a moment that brutally reshaped global security and our understanding of live, televised tragedy. It was a day that forced an unwilling world to confront a new reality. And as we turn the page to September sixth, it’s a date that, in its own way, is just as packed with these moments of reinvention. Not always as violent, but just as profound. Moments where the old way of doing things just… stopped.

And something new, something that would define OUR world, began. So let’s start with that grocery store. Piggly Wiggly. You have to love the name. It sounds whimsical, almost silly. But what its founder, Clarence Saunders, did was anything but. Before 1916, when you went to a grocery store, you didn't... go into the grocery store. Not really. You stood at a counter, you handed a list to a clerk, and that clerk would go back into the aisles and the storerooms, gathering your items for you. It was inefficient. It was slow. It was expensive, because you were paying for all of that labor. And you, the customer, had no freedom. You bought what they had, what the clerk brought you.

You couldn't browse, you couldn't compare prices on the shelf, you couldn't discover a new product you’d never heard of. The very idea of impulse buying didn't really exist in the same way. Clarence Saunders looked at this and saw a system ripe for revolution. His Piggly Wiggly store was the first true self-service grocery. He turned the aisles around, facing them toward the customer. He put the products out where people could see them, touch them, pick them up themselves. He invented the shopping basket. He put prices on every single item. Can you imagine? It seems so obvious to us now, it's literally the wallpaper of our lives. But at the time, this was a radical act of trust.

It was also a radical act of retail genius. By letting customers do the work the clerks used to do, he slashed his labor costs. He could sell goods for cheaper than his competitors, which, of course, brought in more customers. It was a virtuous cycle. Now, it wasn't an overnight success everywhere. The research shows that some places resisted. There were worries about theft—and to be fair, there was theft. There was customer confusion. The whole model was so new that early Piggly Wiggly stores had a defined, one-way path, a maze almost, to guide people through the store and make sure they saw everything before they reached the checkout at the end.

But the efficiency, the lower prices, the sheer empowerment of choice… it was an unstoppable idea. Every supermarket, every big-box store, every single time you wander down an aisle and grab something off a shelf, you are living in the world that Piggly Wiggly created on this day in 1916. It wasn't just a new store. It was the invention of the modern shopper. Now let’s rewind the clock four hundred years. Further. To September sixth, 1522. On this day, a single, battered ship named the Victoria limped into the harbor at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, in Spain. It was a ghost ship, in a way. Three years earlier, it had left this same port as part of a proud fleet of five ships and about two hundred and seventy men, under the command of Ferdinand Magellan.

Their mission was audacious: to find a westward route to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, a route that didn't involve sailing around Africa. They were gone for so long that everyone had given them up for dead. And for most of them, that was true. By the time the Victoria returned, it was the ONLY ship left. And of the original crew, only eighteen haggard, starving men were still aboard. Their captain, Magellan, wasn't one of them. He had been killed in the Philippines more than a year earlier. The man who brought the ship home, the man who completed the mission, was a Basque navigator named Juan Sebastian de Elcano. And what a completion it was.

They had done it. They had circumnavigated the globe. For the first time in human history. Think about the sheer scale of that achievement. We look at a map now and see a sphere, a known quantity. For them, they were sailing off the edge of everything they knew, into myth and monster-filled voids. They faced mutinies, starvation so bad they were eating sawdust and leather, scurvy that rotted their gums, and violent encounters with peoples who had never seen a European before. The return of the Victoria was more than just a feat of navigation. It was a profound psychological shift for humanity. It proved, definitively, physically, that the world was round.

It demonstrated that all the oceans were connected. It redrew the map of the planet not as a series of disconnected regions, but as a single, unified, traversable sphere. The eighteen men who stumbled off that ship on September sixth didn't just bring back a paltry cargo of cloves. They brought back a new world. A world that was suddenly, shockingly, both much larger and much smaller than anyone had ever imagined. This date is also a fascinating one for the people it brought into the world. On September sixth, 1972—the very year of that Munich tragedy we discussed—the actor Idris Elba was born. It’s hard to think of many actors who command the screen with such effortless presence.

On this same day in 1620, an Italian woman named Isabella Leonarda was born. Now, her name might not be as famous, but her story is incredible. She was a composer in the Baroque era, a time when that field was almost exclusively the domain of men. She was an Ursuline nun who spent most of her life in a convent, and from there, she published over two hundred musical compositions, mostly sacred music. She was one of the most prolific composers of her era, male or female. She found a way to have her voice heard, literally, across the centuries. And we have sculptors, like Pietro Tacca, born in 1577, who became the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s chief sculptor.

And we have royalty. On this day in 2006, Prince Hisahito of Akishino was born in Japan. He is currently third in line to the Chrysanthemum Throne, a monarchy that traces its lineage back for well over a thousand years. So on this one day, you have the birth of a future-facing movie star, a trailblazing woman of the past, a master artist, and a link in one of the world's oldest continuous hereditary lines. History isn't just events; it's the people who live through them, and create them. But let’s go to Washington D.C. The summer of 1881. It’s hot. The president is a man named James A. Garfield. He’s only been in office for four months. On July second, he’s at a train station, preparing to leave for a summer vacation, when a man named Charles Guiteau walks up behind him and shoots him twice with a revolver.

Now, here is the turn. The wounds are not immediately fatal. One bullet grazes his arm. The other lodges behind his pancreas. In 1881, medical science is… not what it is today. For the next eighty days, the entire nation holds its breath as President Garfield lies in the White House, slowly, agonizingly dying. And he isn't dying from the bullet. He's dying from the infection. Doctors, including Alexander Graham Bell who tries to find the bullet with a primitive metal detector he invented for the occasion, are probing the wound with unsterilized fingers and instruments. They are, with the best of intentions, killing him. On September sixth, 1881, President Garfield finally succumbs to blood poisoning and a ruptured splenic artery.

He dies. And the nation is not just grief-stricken; it is shocked into action. The assassination becomes a catalyst for two massive changes that define modern America. First, the reason he was shot. His assassin, Guiteau, was a disgruntled and mentally unstable man who believed he was owed a government job for supporting Garfield’s campaign. This was the era of the "spoils system," where political jobs—from postmaster to customs collector—were handed out as rewards for party loyalty. It was corrupt. It was chaotic. Garfield's murder, by someone who felt entitled to a piece of that pie, made the problem impossible to ignore. It laid bare the rotten foundation of the civil service.

The public outcry was so immense that just over a year later, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, creating a professional bureaucracy based on merit, not political connections. It was the beginning of the end for the spoils system. Second, it highlighted the shocking lack of security for the president and the primitive state of American medicine. Garfield's death was a brutal lesson. It forced a reckoning with germs, with sanitation, with the very practice of surgery. And it began the long, slow process of creating a professional security detail for the head of state. So when you look at the death of James A. Garfield on this day, you aren't just seeing a tragedy.

You are seeing the painful, bloody birth of the modern American government and a wake-up call for its medical establishment. A single bullet, and the infection that followed, forced a nation to grow up. Let's take one last journey. To the year 394 CE. The Roman Empire is teetering. It’s split between East and West, and it’s wrestling with its own identity. It’s a Christian empire now, but the old pagan traditions are dying hard. In the West, a usurper named Eugenius has taken power. He’s a Christian himself, but he’s tolerant of the old pagan aristocracy who support him. In the East, the powerful, devoutly Christian Emperor Theodosius I sees this as an existential threat.

On September sixth, 394, their armies meet at the Battle of the Frigidus, near a river in what is now Northern Italy. For two days, they tear each other apart. At first, it looks like the usurper Eugenius will win. His forces are strong. But then, something happens. A powerful wind, called the Bora, whips down from the mountains. It blows directly into the faces of Eugenius’s troops, blinding them with dust and turning their own arrows back against them. Theodosius’s army sees this as a sign of divine intervention. They rally, they charge, and they shatter the enemy lines. Eugenius is captured and executed. Looking back, we can see this wasn't just another Roman battle.

It was one of the last gasps of the classical pagan world. Theodosius’s victory reunified the Roman Empire under a single, Christian ruler for the last time in its history. He would go on to enact policies that suppressed paganism and cemented Christianity as the official, and effectively only, religion of the state. The Battle of the Frigidus, decided on this day by skill, by desperation, and perhaps by a freak gust of wind, didn't just determine who would rule Rome. It helped determine the religious and cultural trajectory of the entire Western world for the next thousand years. So as we look back on September sixth, we see these incredible turning points.

An idea in a Memphis grocery store that rewired our economy of daily life. A dying president in Washington whose death cleaned up a corrupt political system. A single ship returning to Spain, proving the world was one. A battle in a forgotten river valley that set the course for a faith. Each event, a moment where the invisible structures that govern our lives—how we shop, how we are governed, how we see our world—were suddenly thrown into the light, and remade. History isn't just a collection of dates. It's the story of how everything we take for granted came to be.