In 1914, Germany declared war on France at the onset of World War I.

In 1949, the National Basketball Association was formed as a merger of the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League.

In 1966, comedian Lenny Bruce, whose raunchy brand of satire and dark humor landed him in trouble with the law, was found dead in his Los Angeles home.

In 1972, the U.S. Senate ratified the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. (The U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the treaty in 2002.)

In 1981, U.S. air traffic controllers went on strike, despite a warning from President Ronald Reagan that they would be fired, which they were.

In 1993, the Senate voted 96-3 to confirm Supreme Court nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In 1994, Arkansas carried out the nation’s first triple execution in 32 years. Stephen G. Breyer was sworn in as the Supreme Court’s newest justice in a private ceremony at Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s Vermont summer home.

In 2004, the Statue of Liberty pedestal in New York City reopened to the public for the first time since the 9/11 attacks.

In 2005, 14 Marines from a reserve unit in Ohio were killed in a roadside bombing in Iraq.

In 2011, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak denied all charges against him as he went on trial for alleged corruption and complicity in the deaths of protesters who had helped drive him from power. (Mubarak and his security chief were sentenced to life in prison for failing to prevent the killing of hundreds of protesters; they were cleared by a higher court, but Mubarak was later sentenced to three years for corruption.)

The Muscular Dystrophy Association announced that Jerry Lewis was no longer its national chairman and would not be appearing on the Labor Day telethon.

In 2014, Israel withdrew most of its ground troops from the Gaza Strip in an apparent winding down of a nearly monthlong operation against Hamas that had left more than 1,800 Palestinians and more than 60 Israelis dead.

In 2016, President Barack Obama cut short the sentences of 214 federal inmates, including 67 life sentences, in what the White House called the largest batch of commutations on a single day in more than a century.

An Emirates Boeing 777 crash-landed in Dubai and caught fire; all 300 passengers survived, but one firefighter was killed.

In 2018, Las Vegas police said they were closing their investigation into the Oct. 1 shooting that left 58 people dead at a country music festival without a definitive answer for why Stephen Paddock unleashed gunfire from a hotel suite onto the concert crowd.

In 2019, a gunman opened fire at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, leaving 22 people dead; prosecutors said Patrick Crusius targeted Mexicans in hopes of scaring Latinos into leaving the U.S. and that he had outlined the plot in a screed published online shortly before the attack. (A man who was wounded in the shooting died in April 2020 after months in the hospital, raising the death toll to 23. Crusius has pleaded not guilty to state murder charges; he also faces federal hate crime and gun charges.)

In 2020, the St. Louis Cardinals became the second team sidelined by the coronavirus since the shortened baseball season began July 23; seven Cardinals players and six staff members tested positive, causing the team’s four-game series at Detroit to be postponed. (The Miami Marlins would resume play the following day after missing a week of games.) A Norwegian cruise ship line halted all trips after a coronavirus outbreak on one ship infected more than 40 people on board, most of them crew members; the cruise line had been one of the first companies to resume sailing during the pandemic.