Avril Lavigne

On September 27, 1540, Pope Paul III formally approved the Society of Jesus, establishing the Jesuits as an official religious order of the Roman Catholic Church. The movement had been organized by Ignatius of Loyola, a former Spanish soldier who experienced a profound religious conversion and later became a priest. In 1534, Ignatius and six companions pledged themselves to poverty, chastity and missionary service, initially hoping to travel to the Holy Land. Warfare prevented that journey, so they instead offered their services to the pope in Rome. Paul III accepted their proposal, and the Society of Jesus soon became an influential force within the Catholic Church.

The Jesuits expanded rapidly under Ignatius, combining missionary work with an unusually strong commitment to education. They became important participants in the Catholic Reformation, commonly called the Counter-Reformation, while missionaries traveled far beyond Europe to places including India, Brazil, Ethiopia and parts of Africa. Jesuits established schools and colleges, and Ignatius founded institutions in Rome that included the Roman College, which later became the Pontifical Gregorian University. Jesuit missionaries eventually traveled throughout Asia and the Americas, sometimes becoming among the first Europeans to establish sustained contact with distant communities. Their missions could be extremely dangerous, and many Jesuits faced persecution, imprisonment or death.

Political opposition to the Jesuits increased during the 18th century as several European monarchies sought to limit the order's influence. After Jesuits were expelled from a number of countries, Pope Clement XIV formally suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773. The suppression lasted until 1814, when Pope Pius VII restored the order throughout the Catholic Church. Ignatius of Loyola, who had died in 1556 after seeing the organization grow to more than 1,000 members, was canonized in 1622. The Society of Jesus continues to operate internationally, particularly through education, scholarship, missionary activity and other Catholic ministries.

On September 27, 1888, London's Central News Agency received a letter written in red ink and addressed “Dear Boss.” Its author claimed responsibility for the brutal killings then terrifying London's Whitechapel district and signed it with a name that would become infamous: “Jack the Ripper.” The writer threatened further murders and mutilations, although police and journalists suspected from the beginning that the letter might be a hoax. The agency forwarded it to Scotland Yard two days later. After two more women, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, were murdered on September 30, police released copies of the letter in hopes that someone might recognize the handwriting. Instead, publication helped spread the Jack the Ripper name throughout Britain and beyond.

Eleven murders committed in Whitechapel and nearby areas between 1888 and 1891 became part of the broader police investigation known as the Whitechapel murders. Five victims — Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly — are traditionally grouped as the “canonical five” most commonly attributed to the Ripper, although even that grouping remains a matter of historical debate. Newspapers eagerly reported the crimes and applied various names to the unidentified killer before “Jack the Ripper” captured the public imagination. A second communication, the “Saucy Jacky” postcard, reached the Central News Agency on October 1 and claimed responsibility for the September 30 killings. Hundreds of purported Ripper letters subsequently arrived, the overwhelming majority regarded as hoaxes.

Neither the murderer nor the person who wrote the “Dear Boss” letter has ever been conclusively identified, and there is no reliable evidence proving that the killer wrote it. Some investigators and later researchers have suspected that journalists may have created the correspondence to generate publicity, with Central News Agency journalist Thomas Bulling among those subsequently connected to theories about its authorship. Despite generations of investigations, books and proposed suspects, the Whitechapel murders remain unsolved. The letter nevertheless had an extraordinary effect on history: whoever placed the words “Jack the Ripper” at its end supplied an unidentified Victorian murderer with a name that has survived for well over a century.

On September 27, 1960, British suffragette, socialist and anti-fascist campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst died in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Born in Manchester in 1882, she was the daughter of prominent suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst and the younger sister of Christabel Pankhurst. Sylvia studied at the Royal College of Art but increasingly devoted herself to political activism, joining her mother and sister in the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903 to campaign for women's voting rights. She was repeatedly arrested during suffrage demonstrations and endured imprisonment and hunger strikes, but her socialist politics and concern for working-class women increasingly placed her at odds with other WSPU leaders.

Sylvia believed political equality could not be separated from poverty, employment and living conditions, and she concentrated much of her work in London's working-class East End. She also opposed the WSPU's increasing use of militant tactics such as arson and later broke sharply with Emmeline and Christabel over their support for Britain's participation in World War I. After leaving the WSPU, Sylvia led the East London Federation of the Suffragettes, which evolved into the Workers' Suffrage Federation, and published newspapers including the Woman's Dreadnought and later the Workers' Dreadnought. Her politics moved further left after the Russian Revolution; she corresponded with Vladimir Lenin and participated in the early British communist movement, although disagreements over political organization soon separated her from the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In later decades, Pankhurst became a determined opponent of fascism, colonialism and Italy's invasion and occupation of Ethiopia. Her support for Ethiopian independence developed into a lasting commitment to the country, and in 1956 she moved to Addis Ababa with her son, Richard. She continued writing and campaigning there until her death four years later. Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie honored her with a state funeral, and Pankhurst was buried at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa — an extraordinary final chapter for the Manchester-born suffragette whose political causes had eventually carried her far beyond Britain's campaign for the vote.

On September 27, 1989, actress and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor made a dramatic exit from a Beverly Hills courtroom while a prosecutor was delivering closing arguments in her trial for striking a police officer. The case stemmed from a June traffic stop after Beverly Hills police officer Paul Kramer pulled Gabor over while she was driving her Rolls-Royce. Authorities said the car displayed expired registration tags and that Gabor's driver's license was expired; police also reported finding an open container of alcohol in the vehicle. While Kramer was conducting checks, Gabor drove away, prompting the officer to stop her again. During the resulting confrontation, she struck him. Gabor maintained that she had been responding to what she considered excessive treatment by the officer.

The resulting trial became almost as colorful as Gabor's celebrity persona. She attracted considerable press attention and repeatedly supplied reporters with memorable remarks, including comments about one prosecution witness that ran afoul of a judge's gag order. During closing arguments, Deputy District Attorney Elden Fox accused Gabor of seeking publicity from the proceedings and questioned her truthfulness. Her attorney objected, but Gabor had heard enough: she left the courtroom in tears before the prosecutor had finished addressing the jury.

Later that day, the jury convicted Gabor of battery against a police officer as well as other charges arising from the traffic stop. She was ultimately ordered to serve three days in jail, perform 120 hours of community service and pay thousands of dollars in fines and other costs. The incident became one of the most widely reported episodes in the Hungarian-born celebrity's famously eventful public life. Gabor continued making occasional film and television appearances afterward and remained a fixture of celebrity culture for decades. She died in Los Angeles in 2016.