On July 22

On this day in ...
... 1914 (95 years ago today), Hortensia Bussi was born in Valparaiso, Chile. As a young woman she taught history and geography, then worked at a government statistics institute. In 1939, while volunteering in a campaign to aid earthquake victims, she met Salvador Allende; they married the next year. Allende would run 3 times for President before he was finally elected in 1970. First Lady Bussi, pictured at left with President Allende, became active in social aid programs. But her husband died during the coup of September 11, 1973, which began decades of military rule by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Exiled in Mexico, Bussi, known as "Tencha," agitated against Pinochet's government; her contribution is recalled in this El Pais essay by writer and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman. Only after civilian rule was restored did she return home in 1990; there she died last month.
... 1937, "in a session as dramatic as any witnessed in the historic chamber in many years," the Senate voted 70-20 against President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to change the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. The vote sent a bill that would have "packed the Court" by adding a new life-tenured Justice whenever an existing Justice became 70-1/2 years old back to committee, never to return again to the full Senate floor. (image credit) A day later Roosevelt would spin the defeat as victory, contending "that its very agitation caused the Supreme Court to reverse its position, and so advanced the country part way toward the original objectives of the bill"; namely, approval of his New Deal programs. FDR's spin was successful, for that is how historians speak of the controversy to this day.

(Prior July 22 posts are here and here.)

On September 11, ...

... 1857 (150 years ago today), more than 100 children, women, and men, emigrants in a wagon train headed from Arkansas to California, were killed when they made camp in Utah. As the Archeological Institute of America writes of this Mountain Meadows Massacre, "Who attacked the group is an ongoing debate, but historical accounts tell of a combined force of local Mormon militia and Paiute Indians. Executed in 1877, Mormon Bishop John D. Lee was the only person punished for the crime." The story is told as well at this LDS site, and is the subject of a just-released film, "September Dawn." The cairn above marks a mass grave.
... 1973, Chilean President Salvador Allende died in a coup d'état led by his military chief, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Allende, as the BBC reported, was "the world's first democratically-elected Marxist head of state" -- a status that made him a target for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said to have "backed" the military "uprising."
... 2001, hijackers used U.S. civilian airliners as tools of terrorism. The World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington each were hit, killing thousands; a 3d jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The September 11 attacks touched off a campaign that U.S. officials dubbed GWOT, the global war on terror. The attacks were attributed to the Al Qaeda network, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, remains at large to this day.