| 1 September 1181 | Papal States, Italy [administration] | Cardinal Ubald of Ostia is elected Pope Lucius III following the death of Pope Alexander III. |
| 1 September 1239 | Navarre, England, Palestine [Crusades (1095–1272)] | A new crusade, led by King Theobald of Navarre and Richard, Earl of Cornwall (King Henry III of England's brother), arrives at the Palestinian port of Acre (present-day Akko, Israel). |
| 1 September 1271 | Papal States, Italy [administration] | Tedald Visconti of Piacenza is elected Pope Gregory X. |
| 1 September 1443 | Japan [plays] | Japanese dramatist Seami Motokiyo, perhaps the greatest of the No dramatists, dies. He was the son of Kan'ami Kiyotsugo, one of the founding figures of No. Motokiyo wrote nearly half of the classic No repertoire, as well as essays on the theatre, including the major work Kadensho/Book of the Flowery Tradition. |
| 1 September 1494 | Italy, France [wars] | King Charles VIII of France invades Italy in order to claim the throne of Naples, Italy. He crosses the Alps and arrives in Turin, Italy, a week later. |
| 1 September 1653 | Germany [births and deaths] | Johann Pachelbel, German organ composer, known particularly for his Canon in D Major, baptized in Nuremberg, Germany (–1706). |
| 1 September 1715 | France [births and deaths] | Louis XIV (the ‘Sun King’), king of France 1643–1715, famous for his patronage of the arts and his embodiment of the doctrine of Absolutism, dies in Versailles, France (76). |
| 1 September 1715 | France [political events] | Following the death of King Louis XIV of France in Versailles, France, aged 76, he is succeeded by Louis XV, his five-year-old great-grandson, under the regency of his nephew Philippe, duc d'Orléans, until 1723. Louis XIV had decreed that power was to be shared between the duc d'Orléans and the duc de Maine, his illegitimate son. Philip V of Spain, the rightful heir to the French throne, had previously (under the Treaty of Utrecht) surrendered his right of succession to accede to the Spanish throne. |
| 1 September 1879 | Zululand, UK [treaties] | The British sign a peace treaty with the Zulu chiefs with whom they are at war. |
| 1 September 1894 | USA [natural disasters] | In Hinckley, Minnesota, 480 people die as a result of a forest fire. |
| 1 September 1923 | Japan [natural disasters] | Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan, are destroyed by an earthquake estimated to measure 8.3 on the Richter scale; 140,000 die. |
| 1 September 1928 | Albania [political events] | Albania is proclaimed a kingdom and President Ahmed Bey Zogu is elected as King Zog. |
| 1 September 1939 | UK [television] | The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) stops television broadcasting in the UK for the duration of the war in the middle of a Mickey Mouse film. Service is resumed in 1946. |
| 1 September 1939 | Germany, Poland, Italy [World War II (1939–45)] | Germany invades Poland and annexes the free city of Danzig (now Gdansk). Italy declares its neutrality. |
| 1 September 1951 | USA, Australia, New Zealand [treaties] | The USA, Australia, and New Zealand sign the Pacific Security Agreement (also known as the ANZUS Pact), in San Francisco, California, providing for mutual assistance if any signatory power is attacked. |
| 1 September 1969 | Libya [revolution] | Colonel Moamer al-Khaddhafi deposes King Idris of Libya in a military coup. |
| 1 September 1971 | Qatar, UK [decolonization] | Qatar declares its independence from Britain. |
| 1 September 1972 | Iceland [political events] | Iceland unilaterally extends its fishing limit from 19 km/12 mi to 80 km/50 mi. |
| 1 September 1983 | USSR, South Korea [political events] | A South Korean Boeing 747 airliner is shot down by a Soviet fighter, killing 269 people, after straying into Soviet air space near Sakhalin Island. On 5 September, western European nations impose a 14-day ban on flights by the Soviet airline Aeroflot. |
| 1 September 1985 | UK [cinema and film] | The British Board of Film Classification institutes a video classification system. |
| 1 September 1985 | USA [ships and shipping] | The wreck of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, is discovered by US entrepreneur Robert Ballard using the Argo, a remote-controlled robot equipped with video cameras. |
| 1 September 1987 | Belgium [public health] | Belgium becomes the first country to introduce a national smoking ban in all public buildings. |
| 1 September 1988 | USA [births and deaths] | Luis W Alvarez, US physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968 for his discovery of several subatomic particles, dies in Berkeley, California (77). |
| 1 September 1997 | USA [welfare] | Wisconsin introduces a welfare program called ‘Wisconsin Works’ or ‘W2’. The program assumes that every welfare claimant is capable of some type of work and eliminates automatic welfare entitlement. Wisconsin is the first state to do so. |
