Celebrations Today – September 27
Holidays and observances
- Christian feast days:
- Consumación de la Independencia (End of Independence War)(Mexico)
- French Community Holiday (French community of Belgium)
- Google‘s official birthday[1]
- Meskel (Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Church, following Julian calendar, September 28 on leap years)
- National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (United States)
- Polish Underground State’s Day (Poland)
- World Tourism Day (International)
Celebrations Today – USA: September 27
National Chocolate Milk Day
National Crush a Can Day
National Corned Beef Hash Day
National Women’s Health & Fitness Day – Last Wednesday in September
National Ancestor Appreciation Day
National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
World Tourism Day
Today in US History: September 27
Kathy Whitworth, Champion Golfer
Three Women Playing Golf,
ca. 1890.
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
Professional golf’s all-time leading tournament winner Kathy Whitworth was born on September 27, 1939, in Monahans, Texas. Whitworth started playing golf at the age of fifteen. At nineteen she joined the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Tour. Over the next fifteen years, she received the LPGA Player of the Year Award seven times.
Whitworth won her first tournament, the Kelly Girls Open, in 1962. Three years later, she was named the Associated Press Athlete of the Year. She received the award again in 1967. For her outstanding performance between 1968 and 1977, Golf Magazine named Whitworth “Golfer of the Decade.”
Whitworth was inducted into the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame in 1975, but didn’t rest on her laurels. By 1982, she had captured eighty-two LPGA titles. Whitworth won her eighty-eighth title in 1985, setting the tournament victory record for a professional golfer—man or woman.
Women’s Metropolitan Golf Championship, Nassau Country Club.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991
Golf first became popular among American women in the mid-1890s when the growing leisure class adopted it as one of its new amusements. Magazines such as Ladies Home Journal urged women to try the sport, a sixteenth-century favorite of Mary, Queen of Scots.
The Golf Girls,
The Clover Trio: A High Class Singing Act for the Vaudeville Stage Arranged for Ladies Voices, 2,
Samuel H. Speck, 1898.
The American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920
For many women of privilege, golf provided the adventure and challenge missing from their restricted everyday lives. The sport’s popularity grew. and By the 1920s, women’s amateur golf tournaments were attracting a range of players and large crowds.
Golf. Woman with Clubs on Golf Course II,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
ca. 1920-ca. 1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959
In the 1940s and 1950s, golfing greats Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg, and others worked firmly to establish the LPGA Tour, the first professional tour for women, and to make their sport more accessible to women of all races and social classes.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Kathy Whitworth and her peers, including golfing legend Mickey Wright, further developed the LPGA, helping female golfers gain greater acceptance and opportunities for lucrative financial rewards.
- Search across American Memory on golf to find images, articles, and personal recollections on this topic.
- For images of other sports, search across the collections on specific sports such as football, basketball, tennis, or crew. The collection of films, America at Work, America at Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894-1915, offers a view of almost every popular sport from boxing to yachting.
- Baseball fans won’t want to miss the collections By Popular Demand: Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s, Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939, and Baseball Cards, 1887-1914.
- Be sure to see the Today in History features on athletes Althea Gibson, a multi-talented athlete who joined the LPGA Tour after her retirement from professional tennis, as well as those on Jim Thorpe andSatchel Paige.
The Quest of Ponce de León
Fountain of Youth,
Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida,
Wheeler Williams, sculptor,
January 17, 1942.
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America: Photographs by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner, 1935-1955
On September 27, 1514, the Spanish crown granted the explorer Juan Ponce de León a second patent to settle the islands of Bimini and Florida (he thought the latter an island). His first patent, granted in February 1512, authorized him to discover and populate Bimini. For this, his second visit to Florida, he equipped his fleet and sailed for Florida from Puerto Rico in 1521 with two ships, two hundred men, fifty horses, and a variety of domestic animals and agricultural tools.
He landed near Charlotte Harbor on Florida’s west coast. His arrival did not go unnoticed. The party was attacked shortly thereafter by Seminole Indians. During the assault, an arrow struck and wounded Ponce de León. He returned to Cuba where he died as a result of an infection of the wound that same year.
On his first visit to Florida, in April 1513, Ponce de León landed at the site of modern day St. Augustine. He named the region Florida because of the lush, florid vegetation that grew there. Thinking that he had found the island of Bimini, he searched for the mythical Fountain of Youth, said to rejuvenate those who drank from it. Subsequent Spanish incursions in North America led to the founding of a permanent settlement at St. Augustine in 1565.
In the Court of the Ponce de Leon,
St. Augustine, Florida, c1905.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920
- Find images and documents related to the “Sunshine State.” Search the American Memory collections on Ponce de Leon, St. Augustine, or Florida. Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920 is particularly rich in images of St. Augustine.
- For maps of Florida, see the geographic location map in the collection Panoramic Maps.
- Read La colonización de Puerto Rico, des de el descubrimiento de la isla hasta la reversión á la corona española de los privilegios de Colón, and The History of Puerto Rico, from the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation to learn more about Ponce de León and the early history of Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean. These titles are in the collection Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives.
- Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier, a bilingual, multi-format English-Spanish digital library site, explores the interactions between Spain and the United States in America from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The section, “Atlantic & Gulf Coasts” notes that Ponce de León reached Florida in 1513 and includes a print on his discovery of the Mississippi River. Search the collection for other mentions of the explorer.
“‘On February 10, 1521, he [Ponce de Leon] wrote to the emperor: “I discovered Florida and some other small islands at my own expense, and now I am going to settle them with plenty of men and two ships, and I am going to explore the coast, to see if it compares with the lands (Cuba) discovered by Velasquez.…But the captain’s star of fortune was waning. He had a stormy passage, and when he and his men landed they met with such fierce resistance from the natives that after several encounters and the loss of many men, Ponce himself being seriously wounded, they were forced to reembark. Feeling that his end was approaching, the captain did not return to San Juan, but sought a refuge in Puerto Principe, where he died.”Chapter XI: Calamities—Ponce’s Second Expedition to Florida and Death 1520-1537, in
The History of Puerto Rico, from the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation, by R. A. Van Middeldyk, edited by Martin G. Brumbaugh, 1903.
Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives
Alcazar, Cordova, & Ponce de Leon [hotels],
St. Augustine, Florida,
c1910.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991
Today in History – September 27-External Links
Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia