October 1

  • 331 BC – Alexander the Great of Macedon defeated Darius III of Persia at the Battle of Gaugamela, and was subsequently crowned "King of Asia" in a ceremony in Arbela.
  • 1850 – The University of Sydney, Australia's oldest university, was established.
  • 1890 – At the urging of preservationist John Muir and writer Robert Underwood Johnson, the United States Congress established Yosemite National Park in California.
  • 1891 – Stanford University, founded by railroad magnate and California Governor Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Stanford on their former farm lands in Palo Alto, California, officially opened with 559 students and free tuition.
  • 1898 – The Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, currently the largest university focusing on business and economics in Europe, was founded as k.u.k. Exportakademie.
  • 1910 – A large bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times building in Los Angeles, killing 21 people.
  • 1936 – Francisco Franco was declared Generalísimo and head of state during the Spanish Civil War.
  • 1949 – Chinese Civil War: Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
  • 1958 – NASA began operations, replacing the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).
  • 1964 – Tokaido Shinkansen, the first Shinkansen line of high-speed railways in Japan, opened for service.
  • 1965 – A coup d'état in Indonesia by the self-proclaimed Thirtieth of September Movement was crushed by forces of General Suharto and sparked an anti-Communist purge.
  • 1971 – Walt Disney World, the most visited and largest recreational resort in the world, opened near Orlando, Florida.
  • 1991 – The Resource Management Act commenced in New Zealand, regulating access to natural and physical resources such as land, air and water, with sustainable use of these resources being the overriding goal.
  • 2005 – Terrorist suicide bombs exploded at two sites in Bali, Indonesia, killing twenty people and injuring over 120 others.
  • 2009 – The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which acquired the judicial functions of the House of Lords, began work.

October 2

  • 1187 – The Siege of Jerusalem: Ayyubid forces led by Saladin captured Jerusalem, prompting the Third Crusade.
  • 1263 – The armies of Norway and Scotland fought at the Battle of Largs, an inconclusive engagement near the present-day town of Largs in North Ayrshire.
  • 1535 – French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed along the St. Lawrence River and reached the Iroquois fortified village Hochelaga on the island now known as Montreal.
  • 1835 – Mexican dragoons dispatched to disarm settlers at Gonzales, Texas, encountered stiff resistance from a Texian militia in the Battle of Gonzales, the first armed engagement of the Texas Revolution.
  • 1851 – The Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, a contraption built to prove the belief that snails create a permanent telepathic link when they touch, was demonstrated but proved to be a fake.
  • 1928 – Saint Josemaría Escrivá founded Opus Dei, a worldwide organisation of lay members of the Roman Catholic Church.
  • 1941 – World War II: Nazi German forces began Operation Typhoon, an all-out offensive against Moscow, starting the three-month long Battle of Moscow.
  • 1950 – Peanuts, the syndicated comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, featuring Charlie Brown and his pet Snoopy, was first published in major newspapers.
  • 1967 – Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
  • 1968 – A peaceful student demonstration in the Tlatelolco area of Mexico City ended when army and police forces began firing into the crowd.
  • 1992 – In response to a prison riot, military police stormed the Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo, Brazil, killing at least 100 prisoners.
  • 2005 – In American football, 103,467 paid fans at Mexico City's Estadio Azteca watched the Arizona Cardinals defeat the San Francisco 49ers, 31–14, the first-ever National Football League regular season game ever held outside the United States.
  • 2006 – A gunman killed five Amish girls before committing suicide in a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, US.
  • 2009 – During the 121st Session of the International Olympic Committee, Rio de Janeiro was elected the host city of the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics.
  • 2009 – The Twenty-eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland was approved at the second attempt, permitting the state to ratify the European Union's Treaty of Lisbon.

October 3

  • 1283 – Dafydd ap Gruffydd the Prince of Wales, the last native ruler of Wales to resist English domination, was executed by drawing and quartering.
  • 1849 – American author Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious in a gutter in Baltimore, Maryland, under mysterious circumstances; it was the last time he was seen in public before his death four days later.
  • 1908 – The original incarnation of the Pravda newspaper was founded by Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and other Russian exiles in Vienna.
  • 1918 – World War I: Following his armed forces' defeat to the Allied Powers, Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria abdicated in favor of his son Boris III.
  • 1929 – King Alexander I renamed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and changed its subdivisions from the 33 oblasts to nine new banovinas.
  • 1935 – Italian forces under General Emilio De Bono invaded Abyssinia during the opening stages of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War.
  • 1942 – World War II: The first successful test of the German V-2 rocket, the world's first ballistic missile and first human artifact to achieve sub-orbital spaceflight, occurred.
  • 1951 – In Major League Baseball, the New York Giants' Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot Heard 'Round the World", a game winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the National League pennant after being down 14 games.
  • 1951 – Korean War: The First Battle of Maryang San, primarily pitting Australian and British forces against communist China, began.
  • 1964 – According to a popular legend, the first Buffalo wings were prepared at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, US as a fast and easy snack to present to hungry guests.
  • 1981 – The Hunger Strike by Irish Republican Army prisoners at the Maze jail in Belfast ended after seven months and 10 deaths.
  • 1990 – The German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany officially joined to form the first fully sovereign united German state since the end of World War II.
  • 1993 – American armed forces attempted to capture officials of Somalian warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid's organisation at the Battle of Mogadishu.
  • 1995 – In a highly publicised criminal trial, actor and former American football player O. J. Simpson was acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
  • 2003 – Roy Horn of the American entertainment duo of Siegfried & Roy was mauled by a tiger during a performance at The Mirage hotel and casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip.

October 4

  • 1777 – American Revolutionary War: British forces were victorious at the Battle of Germantown, ensuring that Philadelphia, the capital of the revolutionary government of the Thirteen Colonies, would remain in British hands throughout the winter of 1777–1778.
  • 1830 – A provisional government in Brussels declared the creation of the independent and neutral state of Belgium, in revolt against the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.
  • 1883 – The Orient Express began operations.
  • 1910 – Manuel II, the last King of Portugal, fled to Gibraltar when a revolution erupted in Lisbon and his palace was shelled. The Portuguese First Republic was proclaimed the next day.
  • 1918 – An ammunition plant exploded in Sayreville, New Jersey, US, killing over 100 people and destroying more than 300 buildings.
  • 1957 – Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, was launched by an R-7 rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam, Kazakh SSR.
  • 1985 – Software developer Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation to support the free software movement.
  • 1993 – Russian Constitutional Crisis: Tanks bombarded the White House in Moscow while demonstrators against President Boris Yeltsin rallied outside.
  • 2001 – Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 crashed into the Black Sea, killing all 78 people on board.
  • 2003 – A suicide bomber killed 21 people and injured more than 50 others inside the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, Israel.

October 5

  • 869 – The Fourth Council of Constantinople, the eighth Catholic Ecumenical Council, was convened to discuss the patriarchate of Photios I of Constantinople.
  • 1877 – After battling the U.S. Army for more than three months, retreating over 1,000 miles across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana, and enduring a five-day siege, Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce band finally surrendered.
  • 1903 – Samuel Griffith became the first Chief Justice of Australia, while Edmund Barton and Richard O'Connor became the first Puisne Justices of the High Court of Australia.
  • 1908 – Prince Ferdinand became the first Tsar of Bulgaria since the Ottoman invasion in the 14th century.
  • 1945 – A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators boiled over into a bloody riot at the gates of the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California.
  • 1948 – The International Union for Conservation of Nature was founded at a congress sponsored by UNESCO director Julian Huxley in Fontainebleau, France.
  • 1962 – Dr. No, the first in the James Bond film series, was released.
  • 1963 – The U.S. suspended the Commercial Import Programme, its main economic support for South Vietnam, in response to oppression of Buddhism by President Ngo Dinh Diem.
  • 1969 – The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus was broadcast on BBC1.
  • 1970 – Members of the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped British diplomat James Cross, sparking the October Crisis in Montreal, Canada.
  • 1974 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated bombs in two pubs in Guildford, England, killing 5 total people and injuring 65 others.
  • 1986 – The British newspaper The Sunday Times published a story by Mordechai Vanunu, a former nuclear technician, revealing details of Israel's nuclear capability.

October 6

  • 105 BC – The Cimbri and the Teutons inflicted a major defeat on the Roman Republic in the Battle of Arausio.
  • 1849 – In Arad, present-day Romania, 13 Hungarian rebel honvéd generals who became known as the 13 Martyrs of Arad were executed by Austrian authorities for their part in the Hungarian Revolution.
  • 1854 – The Great fire of Newcastle and Gateshead in North East England began, destroying a substantial amount of property, killing over 50 people, and injuring hundreds of others.
  • 1927 – The first successful feature sound film The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, was released.
  • 1973 – Egypt, under the leadership of President Anwar Sadat, launched Operation Badr in co-ordination with Syria, crossing the Suez Canal and attacking the fortified Israeli Bar Lev Line, starting the Yom Kippur War.
  • 1976 – A violent crackdown by Thai military and police units on students and protestors on the grounds of Thammasat University and at Sanam Luang in Bangkok led to 46 deaths, and a military coup against the government of Prime Minister Seni Pramoj.
  • 1976 – Premier Hua Guofeng ordered the arrest of the Gang of Four and their associates, putting an end to the Cultural Revolution in China.
  • 1981 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated while attending a parade in Cairo to mark the eighth anniversary of the Crossing of the Bar Lev Line at the start of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
  • 1995 – In an article published by the scientific journal Nature, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz reported the discovery of a planet orbiting 51 Pegasi as the first known extrasolar planet around a main-sequence star.
  • 1998 – University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay near Laramie, Wyoming, US.

October 7

  • 1542 – Explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo became the first European to set foot on Santa Catalina Island off the coast of California.
  • 1571 – The Ottoman Empire was decisively defeated by the Christian West for the first time, as a multinational fleet led by Don John of Austria crushed the Turkish navy near the Gulf of Corinth in the Battle of Lepanto.
  • 1763 – Following Great Britain's acquisition of New France after the end of the Seven Years' War, King George III issued a Royal Proclamation closing most of this land to the colonists of the Thirteen Colonies.
  • 1780 – American Revolutionary War: The Patriots defeated the Loyalists at the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina.
  • 1849 – American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe died under mysterious circumstances at Washington Medical College four days after being found on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, in a delirious and incoherent state.
  • 1868 – Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US opened, with an initial enrollment of 412 students the next day.
  • 1912 – The Helsinki Stock Exchange located in Helsinki, Finland, saw its first transaction.
  • 1919 – KLM, the oldest airline in the world still operating under its original name, was founded.
  • 1949 – East Berlin and the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany became the German Democratic Republic.
  • 1958 – Attempting to control the political instability in Pakistan, President Iskander Mirza suspended the 1956 constitution, imposed martial law, and cancelled the elections scheduled for January 1959.
  • 1959 – Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 captured the first photographs of the far side of the Moon.
  • 1967 – Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader Che Guevara was captured near La Higuera, Bolivia.
  • 1985 – The Mediterranean ocean liner Achille Lauro was hijacked by Palestine Liberation Front terrorists while sailing from Alexandria to Port Said within Egypt.
  • 2001 – War on Terrorism: The War in Afghanistan (2001–present) began at 16:30 UTC with an aerial bombing campaign targeting Taliban and Al-Qaida forces.
  • 2003 – Californians voted to recall Governor Gray Davis from office and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger from a list of 135 candidates.

October 8

  • 451 – The Council of Chalcedon, the fourth ecumenical council in Christianity, opened. It repudiated the Eutychian doctrine of monophysitism, and set forth the Chalcedonian Creed.
  • 1600 – San Marino, the world's oldest constitutional republic, adopted its written constitution.
  • 1821 – The Peruvian Navy was established by the government of José de San Martín.
  • 1856 – Officials of the Chinese Qing Dynasty arrested and imprisoned twelve people aboard the Hong Kong-registered ship Arrow for suspected piracy and smuggling, sparking the Second Opium War.
  • 1871 – The Great Chicago Fire broke out in Chicago, destroying 17,500 buildings and leaving 90,000 people homeless within two days.
  • 1879 – The Chilean Navy defeated the Peruvian Navy in the Battle of Angamos, a decisive encounter during the War of the Pacific.
  • 1895 – Queen Min, the last empress of Korea, was assassinated.
  • 1897 – Composer Gustav Mahler was appointed the director of the Vienna Court Opera.
  • 1918 – World War I: After his platoon suffered heavy casualties during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in France's Forest of Argonne, United States Sergeant Alvin C. York led the seven remaining men on an attack against a German machine gun nest, killing 28 German soldiers and capturing 132 others.
  • 1932 – The Indian Air Force was founded as an auxiliary air force of the Indian Empire.
  • 1962 – The Spiegel scandal: News magazine Der Spiegel uncovered the sorry state of the West German armed forces (the Bundeswehr), then facing the communist threat from the east. The magazine was accused of treason shortly afterwards.
  • 1985 – The musical Les Misérables, based on the novel by Victor Hugo, opened in London's Barbican Centre, starting its run as the longest-running West End musical in history.
  • 2001 – In response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush announced the creation of an Office of Homeland Security to coordinate homeland security efforts, with former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge as its director.
  • 2001 – At Linate Airport in Milan, Italy, Scandinavian Airlines Flight SK686 collided on take-off with a Cessna Citation II business jet, killing 118 people.
  • 2005 – A major earthquake centred in Kashmir killed over 74,500 people and injured at least 106,000 others in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan.

October 9

  • 1237 – James I of Aragon entered Valencia and established the Kingdom of Valencia.
  • 1514 – Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII of England, became queen consort of France.
  • 1701 – The Collegiate School of Connecticut, later renamed Yale University, was chartered in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, US.
  • 1831 – Ioannis Kapodistrias, the Greek head of state, was assassinated in Nafplion.
  • 1845 – Anglican priest John Henry Newman was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church.
  • 1874 – The Universal Postal Union, then known as the General Postal Union, was established with the signing of the Treaty of Bern to unify disparate postal services and regulations so that international mail could be exchanged freely.
  • 1888 – The Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., at the time the world's tallest building, officially opened to the general public.
  • 1919 – In Major League Baseball, the Cincinnati Reds won the World Series, five games to three, over the Chicago White Sox, whose players were later found to have lost intentionally.
  • 1942 – World War II: American forces defeated the Japanese at the Third Battle of the Matanikau in Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, avenging the Japanese victory at the Second Battle of the Matanikau a couple of weeks earlier.
  • 1963 – A landslide displaced large amounts of water from the Vajont Dam in northern Italy, causing waves and floods that quickly swept away several villages and killed almost 2,000 people.
  • 1970 – The Khmer Republic was proclaimed in Cambodia.
  • 2006 – North Korea conducted a nuclear test, reportedly near Kilchu, with an explosive force of less than one kiloton, that was unanimously condemned and denounced by many countries and the United Nations Security Council.

October 10

  • 732 – Charles Martel and the Franks defeated a large Andalusian Muslim army led by Abd er Rahman at the Battle of Tours near Tours and Poitiers.
  • 1780 – One of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on record struck the Caribbean Sea, killing at least 22,000 people over several days.
  • 1845 – The United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, opened with 50 Midshipmen students.
  • 1868 – Carlos Manuel de Céspedes made the Grito de Yara, declaring Cuban independence from Spain, sparking the Ten Years' War.
  • 1911 – The Xinhai Revolution began with the Wuchang Uprising, marking the beginning of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China.
  • 1919 – German composer Richard Strauss' opera Die Frau ohne Schatten premiered in Vienna.
  • 1943 – World War II: The Kempeitai, the military police arm of the Imperial Japanese Army, arrested and tortured over 50 civilians and civilian internees on suspicion of their involvement in a raid on Singapore Harbour during Operation Jaywick.
  • 1967 – The Outer Space Treaty, a treaty that forms the basis of international space law, entered into force.
  • 1973 – United States Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after being charged with tax evasion.
  • 1982 – Maximilian Kolbe, who had volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland, was canonised by the Catholic Church.

October 11

  • 1138 – A massive earthquake, one of the deadliest in recorded history, struck Aleppo, Syria.
  • 1776 – American Revolutionary War: The British Royal Navy defeated American ships at the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain, but gave American forces enough time to prepare their defences for the Saratoga campaign.
  • 1852 – The University of Sydney, Australia's oldest university, was inaugurated in Sydney two years after the New South Wales Legislative Council established it with the passage of the University of Sydney Act.
  • 1865 – The Morant Bay rebellion, led by Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, began in Jamaica, but eventually it was brutally suppressed by Governor Edward John Eyre.
  • 1899 – The Second Boer War erupted in South Africa between the United Kingdom and the Boers.
  • 1942 – World War II: At the Battle of Cape Esperance on the northwest coast of Guadalcanal, American ships intercepted and defeated a Japanese fleet on their way to reinforce troops on the island.
  • 1954 – Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh took control of North Vietnam under the terms of the Geneva Accords which saw the end of the First Indochina War and French colonisation.
  • 1962 – Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, the first Roman Catholic ecumenical council in 92 years.
  • 1968 – Apollo 7, the first manned mission of NASA's Apollo programme, and the first three-man American space mission, launched from Complex 34 in present-day Cape Canaveral, Florida.
  • 1975 – Saturday Night Live, an American weekly comedy–variety show, was broadcast for the first time.
  • 1982 – The Mary Rose, a 16th century warship which sank on July 19, 1545, was salvaged from the sea bed of the Solent off Portsmouth.
  • 1987 – Sri Lankan Civil War: The Indian Peace Keeping Force began Operation Pawan to take control of Jaffna from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in order to enforce their disarmament as a part of the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord.

October 12

  • 1398 – The Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas the Great and the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights Konrad von Jungingen signed the Treaty of Salynas, the third attempt after the 1384 Treaty of Königsberg and the 1390 Treaty of Lyck to cede Samogitia to the Knights.
  • 1492 – Believing he had reached India, Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean, sparking a series of events that led to the European colonisation of the Americas.
  • 1859 – Self-described "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico" Emperor Norton "ordered" the United States Congress to dissolve.
  • 1871 – The Criminal Tribes Act entered into force in British India, giving law enforcement sweeping powers to arrest, control, and monitor the movements of the members of 160 specific ethnic or social communities that were defined as "habitually criminal".
  • 1915 – A German firing squad executed British nurse Edith Cavell for helping Allied soldiers to escape occupied Belgium.
  • 1928 – An iron lung medical ventilator, designed by Philip Drinker and colleagues at Children's Hospital, Boston, was used for the first time in the treatment of polio victims.
  • 1960 – Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev infamously pounded his shoe on a desk during the Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in response to Filipino delegate Lorenzo Sumulong's assertion of Soviet colonial policy being conducted in Eastern Europe.
  • 1968 – Equatorial Guinea gained independence from Spain.
  • 1984 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, in a failed attempt to assassinate British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her cabinet.
  • 1999 – A military coup in Pakistan led by General Pervez Musharraf ousted the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
  • 2000 – Two suicide bombers attacked the destroyer USS Cole while it was at anchor in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 of its crew members and injuring 39 others.
  • 2002 – A series of bombs planted by Islamist militant group Jemaah Islamiyah exploded in Bali, Indonesia, killing 202 people and injuring 209 others.

October 13

  • 54 – Claudius was fatally poisoned at the instigation of his wife Agrippina the Younger, making her 16-year-old son Nero the next Roman Emperor.
  • 1307 – Agents of King Philip IV of France launched a dawn raid, simultaneously arresting many members of the Knights Templar, and subsequently torturing them into "admitting" heresy.
  • 1773 – French astronomer Charles Messier discovered the Whirlpool Galaxy, an interacting, grand-design spiral galaxy located at a distance of approximately 23 million light-years in the constellation Canes Venatici.
  • 1792 – The cornerstone for the Executive Mansion in Washington, D.C., later to be known as the White House, was laid.
  • 1812 – War of 1812: British troops and Mohawk warriors repelled an American invasion from across the Niagara River at the Battle of Queenston Heights near Queenston, Ontario.
  • 1843 – The B'nai B'rith, the oldest continually operating Jewish service organisation in the world, was founded in New York City.
  • 1884 – Greenwich, in London, England, was established as Universal Time meridian of longitude.
  • 1885 – The Georgia Institute of Technology was established in Atlanta as part of Reconstruction plans to build an industrial economy in the post-Civil War Southern United States.
  • 1917 – An estimated 100,000 people in the Cova da Iria fields near Fátima, Portugal, witnessed "The Miracle of the Sun".
  • 1943 – World War II: With a new government led by General Pietro Badoglio, parts of Italy switched sides to the Allies and declared war on the Axis Powers.
  • 1972 – Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed into a remote area in the Andes mountains near the border of Chile and Argentina; the last of 16 survivors were not rescued until December 23.

October 14

  • 1066 – Norman Conquest of England: Battle of Hastings: The forces of William the Conqueror defeated the English army and killed Harold Godwinson, the last crowned Anglo-Saxon king of England.
  • 1773 – The first recorded ministry of education, the Commission of National Education, was formed in Poland.
  • 1805 – War of the Third Coalition: French forces under Marshal Michel Ney defeated Austrian forces in Elchingen, present-day Germany.
  • 1806 – Battle of Jena-Auerstedt: French forces under Napoleon secure a decisive victory over the Prussians, effectively eliminating Prussia from the War of the Fourth Coalition after only nineteen days of fighting.
  • 1888 – French inventor Louis Le Prince filmed Roundhay Garden Scene, the earliest surviving motion picture, in Roundhay, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.
  • 1912 – While campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was shot by saloonkeeper John Schrank. With a fresh flesh wound and the bullet still in him, Roosevelt still delivered his scheduled speech and was later driven to Chicago for treatment by John Benjamin Murphy.
  • 1913 – In the worst mining accident in the United Kingdom, 439 miners were killed by an explosion at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd, Wales.
  • 1939 – World War II: The German submarine U-47 torpedoed and sunk the British Royal Navy battleship HMS Royal Oak while the latter was anchored at Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland.
  • 1947 – Flying at an altitude of 45,000 ft (13.7 km) in an experimental Bell X-1 rocket-powered aircraft, American test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier.
  • 1953 – Israeli military commander Ariel Sharon and his Unit 101 special forces attacked the village of Qibya on the West Bank, destroying 45 buildings, killing 42 villagers, and wounding 15 others.
  • 1969 – The British fifty pence coin was introduced to replace the ten shilling note, but its size initially caused people to mistake it for both the old half crown and the new ten pence piece.
  • 1981 – Hosni Mubarak was elected President of Egypt, one week after Anwar Sadat was assassinated.

October 15

  • 1582 – Spain, Portugal, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and most of the Italian states became the first countries to replace the Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar.
  • 1864 – American Civil War: The Confederates captured Glasgow, Missouri.
  • 1888 – A man who claimed to be Jack the Ripper wrote the "From Hell" letter, widely considered by many researchers to be one of only a few reasonable candidates to possibly be authentic writing from the serial killer.
  • 1894 – The Dreyfus affair: Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French military, was wrongly arrested for treason.
  • 1917 – Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari was executed by a firing squad for spying for Germany.
  • 1951 – Mexican chemist Luis E. Miramontes conducted the very last step of the first synthesis of norethisterone, the progestin that would later be used in one of the first two oral contraceptives.
  • 1954 – Hurricane Hazel made landfall in The Carolinas in the United States before moving north to Toronto in Canada later the same day, killing a total of 176 people in both countries.
  • 1966 – The Black Panther Party, a Marxist/Maoist African-American organisation that promoted Black Power and self-defence in the United States, was founded in Oakland, California.
  • 1970 – Thirty-five construction workers were killed when a section of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne collapsed due to structural failure.
  • 1987 – The Great Storm of 1987 hit France and England, killing at least 23 people.
  • 1997 – On the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, the first supersonic land speed record was set by Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green in the jet-propelled car ThrustSSC when it achieved a speed of 1,228 km/h (763 mph).
  • 2003 – Chinese space programme: Shenzhou 5, China's first manned space mission, was launched, carrying astronaut Yang Liwei.
  • 2005 – The electorate of Iraq approved a referendum to ratify a new constitution.
  • 2006 – An offshore earthquake measuring 6.7 Mw occurred 10 km (6 miles) southwest of the Island of Hawaii.
  • 2007 – New Zealand Police conducted several anti-terrorism raids in relation to the discovery of an alleged paramilitary training camp in the Urewera mountain ranges, arresting 17 people and seizing four guns and 230 rounds of ammunition.

October 16

  • 456 – Magister militum Ricimer defeated Emperor Avitus at Piacenza and became master of the Western Roman Empire.
  • 1793 – Marie Antoinette, queen consort of Louis XVII, was guillotined at the Place de la Révolution in Paris at the height of the French Revolution.
  • 1813 – The Sixth Coalition attacked Napoleon and the First French Empire in the Battle of Leipzig, the largest conflict in the Napoleonic Wars with over 500,000 troops involved.
  • 1843 – William Rowan Hamilton first wrote down the fundamental formula for quaternions, carving the equation into the side of Broom Bridge in Cabra, Dublin, Ireland.
  • 1923 – With his brother Roy, Walt Disney founded an animation studio in Hollywood that eventually grew to become one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world.
  • 1940 – World War II: Nazi Governor-General Hans Frank established the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland.
  • 1972 – Emmerdale Farm was first broadcast in the daytime on ITV.
  • 1978 – Karol Józef Wojtyla, a cardinal from Kraków, Poland, became Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope since the 16th century and the first ever from a Slavic country.
  • 1984 – The Bill debuted on ITV, eventually becoming the longest-running police procedural in British television history.
  • 1995 – Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam convened the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., in an effort to unite in self-help and self-defence against economic and social ills plaguing the African American community.
  • 1996 – At least 83 people were killed and more than 140 injured when an excessive number of fans attempted to squeeze into Guatemala City's Estadio Mateo Flores to see the 1998 FIFA World Cup qualification match between Guatemala and Costa Rica.
  • 2002 – Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, a commemoration of the Library of Alexandria that was lost in antiquity, was officially inaugurated.

October 17

  • 1346 – King David II of Scotland was captured in the Battle of Neville's Cross.
  • 1448 – Ottoman wars in Europe: The Hungarian army led by John Hunyadi engaged an Ottoman army led by Sultan Murad II.
  • 1456 – The University of Greifswald in present-day Greifswald, Germany, was founded with the approval of the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope.
  • 1604 – Kepler's Star: German astronomer Johannes Kepler observed an exceptionally bright star which had suddenly appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus.
  • 1662 – King Charles II of England sold Dunkirk to France for £40,000.
  • 1806 – Emperor Jacques I of Haiti was assassinated near Port-au-Prince.
  • 1860 – The Open Championship, the oldest of the four major championships in men's golf, was first played at Prestwick Golf Club in Prestwick, Ayrshire, Scotland.
  • 1961 – In Paris, the French police under the Prefect of Police Maurice Papon attacked a peaceful but illegal demonstration of some 30,000 who were protesting the Algerian War, killing between 40 and 200 people.
  • 1964 – Prime Minister of Australia Robert Menzies opened the artificial Lake Burley Griffin in the middle of the capital Canberra.
  • 1968 – To protest racism in the United States, African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed the Black Power salute during a medal ceremony at the Mexico City Summer Olympics.
  • 1973 – The Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries began an oil embargo against a number of western countries, whom they believed were helping Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
  • 1977 – German Autumn: Four days after it was hijacked, Lufthansa Flight 181 landed in Mogadishu, Somalia, where a team of German GSG 9 commandos rescued all remaining hostages on board.
  • 1989 – A 6.9 Mw earthquake struck California's San Francisco Bay Area, killing 63 people, injuring 3,757, leaving at least 8,000 homeless, and forcing the postponement of Game 3 of Major League Baseball's World Series.

October 18

  • 1009 – Under orders from Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a Christian church now within the walled Old City of Jerusalem, was destroyed.
  • 1016 – Danish forces led by Canute the Great decisively defeated Edmund Ironside in the Battle of Ashingdon, gaining control over most of the Kingdom of England.
  • 1081 – Byzantine–Norman wars: The Normans under Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia and Calabria, defeated the Byzantines outside the city of Dyrrhachium, the Byzantine capital of Illyria.
  • 1356 – The most significant earthquake to have occurred in Central Europe in recorded history destroyed Basel, Switzerland, and caused much destruction in a vast region extending into France and Germany.
  • 1748 – The War of the Austrian Succession ended with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
  • 1851 – Moby-Dick, a novel by American writer Herman Melville, was first published as The Whale.
  • 1922 – The British Broadcasting Company was incorporated by a consortium to establish a network of radio transmitters to provide a national broadcasting service in the United Kingdom.
  • 1954 – The first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, was introduced in Indianapolis, Indiana, US.
  • 1968 – At the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, American Bob Beamon set a world record of 8.90 m in the long jump, a mark that stood for 23 years.
  • 1977 – Various Red Army Faction members died in prison, officially by suicide, ending the German Autumn crisis.
  • 2007 – A suicide attack on a motorcade carrying former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto in Karachi resulted in at least 139 deaths and 450 injuries.

October 19

  • 202 BC – Proconsul Scipio Africanus of the Roman Republic defeated Hannibal and the Carthaginians in the Battle of Zama, concluding the Second Punic War.
  • 1469 – Ferdinand II of Aragon married Isabella I of Castile, a marriage that paved the way to the unification of Aragon and Castile into a single country, Spain.
  • 1781 – American Revolutionary War: British forces led by Lord Cornwallis officially surrendered to Franco-American forces under George Washington, ending the Siege of Yorktown.
  • 1943 – Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, was first isolated by researchers at Rutgers University.
  • 1986 – President of Mozambique Samora Machel and 43 others were killed when his presidential aircraft crashed in the Lebombo Mountains just inside the border of South Africa.
  • 1987 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 22.6% on Black Monday, at the time one of the largest one-day percentage declines in stock market history.
  • 2001 – SIEV X, an Indonesian fishing boat en route to Christmas Island carrying over 400 asylum seekers, sank in international waters, killing 353 of them.
  • 2004 – Irish aid worker Margaret Hassan was abducted in Baghdad by unidentified kidnappers, who murdered her about four weeks later.

October 20

  • 1708 – Having burned down in the 1666 Great Fire of London, the rebuilt St Paul's Cathedral was completed on the 76th birthday of its architect, Christopher Wren.
  • 1740 – Per the terms of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, Maria Theresa assumed the throne of the Habsburg Monarchy in Austria.
  • 1818 – The United Kingdom and the United States signed the Treaty of 1818, which settled the Canada – United States border on the 49th parallel for most of its length.
  • 1827 – An allied British, French, and Russian naval force destroyed a combined Turkish and Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino, a decisive moment in the Greek War of Independence.
  • 1883 – Peru and Chile signed the Treaty of Ancón, ending Peru's involvement in the War of the Pacific.
  • 1941 – World War II: German soldiers began a massacre of thousands of civilians in Kragujevac in Nazi-occupied Serbia.
  • 1967 – Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin filmed an unidentified subject at Six Rivers National Forest in California who they claimed was a bigfoot.
  • 1973 – Elizabeth II, in her capacity as Queen of Australia, formally opened the Sydney Opera House on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbour.
  • 1991 – An urban fire killed 25 people, injured 150 others, and destroyed over 3,000 homes in the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, California, US.

October 21

  • 1600 – Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the leaders of rival Japanese clans at the Battle of Sekigahara in what is now Sekigahara, Gifu, clearing the path for him to form the Tokugawa shogunate.
  • 1805 – Napoleonic Wars: Lord Nelson signalled "England expects that every man will do his duty" to the rest of his Royal Navy forces before they defeated Pierre-Charles Villeneuve and his combined French and Spanish navy at the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain's Cape Trafalgar.
  • 1824 – English stonemason, bricklayer and inventor Joseph Aspdin patented Portland cement, currently the most common type of cement in general usage in many parts of the world.
  • 1854 – Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses were sent to Turkey to help treat wounded British soldiers fighting in the Crimean War.
  • 1858 – French composer Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, featuring the can-can, was first performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens in Paris.
  • 1867 – The first of the Medicine Lodge Treaties was signed between the United States and several Native American tribes in the Great Plains, requiring them to relocate to areas in present-day western Oklahoma.
  • 1944 – World War II: German forces surrendered to American troops, ending the Battle of Aachen.
  • 1945 – Argentine military officer and politician Juan Domingo Perón married popular actress Eva Duarte, better known as Evita.
  • 1966 – A coal tip fell on the village of Aberfan, Wales, killing 144 people, mostly schoolchildren.
  • 1969 – Siad Barre became President after a military coup in Somalia.
  • 1978 – After reporting contact with an unidentified aircraft, Frederick Valentich disappeared in unexplained circumstances while piloting a Cessna 182L light aircraft over the Bass Strait to King Island, Australia.
  • 1983 – At the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures, the length of a metre was redefined as the distance light travels in vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
  • 1987 – Sri Lankan Civil War: Indian Army soldiers, belonging to the Indian Peace Keeping Force, entered the Jaffna Teaching Hospital in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and began killing about 68–70 patients, nurses, doctors and other staff members.

October 22

  • 1383 – King Ferdinand I of Portugal died without a male heir to the Portuguese throne, resulting in a period of civil war and anarchy.
  • 1797 – André-Jacques Garnerin carried out the first parachute jump of note from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet above Paris.
  • 1836 – Sam Houston became the first president of the Republic of Texas.
  • 1844 – Millerites, including future members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, were greatly disappointed that Jesus did not return as predicted by American preacher William Miller.
  • 1883 – The Metropolitan Opera in New York City opened with a performance of French composer Charles Gounod's opera Faust.
  • 1895 – A Granville–Paris Express train overran the buffer stop at Paris' Gare Montparnasse station, careening across the concourse before crashing out of the station and plummeting onto the Place de Rennes below.
  • 1924 – The educational non-profit organisation Toastmasters International was founded at a YMCA in Santa Ana, California.
  • 1934 – Pretty Boy Floyd, an American bank robber and alleged killer who was later romanticised by the media, was gunned down by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents near East Liverpool, Ohio.
  • 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced on television that Soviet nuclear weapons had been discovered in Cuba and that he had ordered a naval "quarantine" of the island nation.
  • 1964 – After the Nobel Committee announced that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre became the first Nobel Laureate to voluntarily decline the prize, saying that he did not wish to be "transformed" by such an award.
  • 1999 – Vichy France official Maurice Papon was jailed for crimes against humanity committed during World War II.
  • 2006 – An expansion project to double the Panama Canal's capacity was approved by Panamanian voters in a national referendum by a wide margin.
  • 2008 – India launched Chandrayaan-1, the country's first unmanned lunar mission.

October 23

  • 42 BCE – Roman Republican civil wars: At the Second Battle of Philippi, Brutus's army was decisively defeated by Mark Antony and Octavian.
  • 425 – Valentinian III became Emperor of the Western Roman Empire at the age of six.
  • 1642 – The Battle of Edgehill, the first pitched battle of the First English Civil War between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, was fought to an inconclusive result near Edge Hill and Kineton in southern Warwickshire.
  • 1739 – Great Britain declared war on Spain, starting the War of Jenkins' Ear.
  • 1906 – Early flight: Alberto Santos-Dumont flew the 14-bis aircraft for 60 metres (200 ft) at a height of two to three metres (10 ft).
  • 1956 – The Hungarian Revolution began as a peaceful student demonstration which attracted thousands as it marched through central Budapest to the Parliament building.
  • 1958 – In his comic series Johan and Peewit in the weekly magazine Spirou, Belgian cartoonist Peyo introduced a new set of small sky blue characters known as The Smurfs.
  • 1972 – Operation Linebacker, a US bombing campaign against North Vietnam in response to its Easter Offensive, ended after five months.
  • 1983 – Lebanese Civil War: Suicide bombers destroyed two barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers of the international peacekeeping force.
  • 2001 – The iPod, the line of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple, was launched.
  • 2002 – Chechen rebels seized a crowded theatre in Moscow, taking approximately 700 theatregoers and performers hostage in the Moscow theatre hostage crisis.

October 24

  • 1260 – The Chartres Cathedral in Chartres, France, was dedicated in the presence of King Louis IX.
  • 1260 – Qutuz, Mamluk sultan of Egypt, was assassinated by a fellow Mamluk leader, Baibars, who then seized power for himself.
  • 1648 – The second treaty of the Peace of Westphalia, the Treaty of Münster, was signed, ending both the Thirty Years' War and the Dutch Revolt, and officially recognising the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and Swiss Confederation as independent states.
  • 1857 – Sheffield F.C., one of the world's oldest documented non-university football clubs, was founded.
  • 1861 – The First Transcontinental Telegraph line across the United States was completed from Omaha, Nebraska, to Carson City, Nevada, spelling the end for the Pony Express.
  • 1912 – First Balkan War: Serbian forces defeated the Ottoman army at the Battle of Kumanovo in Vardar Macedonia.
  • 1929 – Wall Street Crash of 1929.
  • 1931 – The George Washington Bridge, today considered one of the world's busiest bridges in terms of vehicle traffic, connecting New York City to Fort Lee, New Jersey, was dedicated.
  • 1945 – The UN Charter, the constitution of the United Nations, entered into force after being ratified by the Republic of China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and a majority of the other signatories.
  • 1960 – A prototype of the Soviet R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile exploded on the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam, Kazakh SSR, killing at least 90 people.
  • 1964 – Northern Rhodesia gained independence from the United Kingdom and was renamed Zambia after the Zambezi river which flows through the country.
  • 1964 – The military court of South Vietnamese junta chief Nguyen Khanh acquitted Generals Duong Van Duc and Lam Van Phat of leading a September 1964 coup attempt against Khanh, despite the pair's proclamation of his overthrow during their military action.

October 25

  • 1147 – Reconquista: Forces under King Afonso I of Portugal captured Lisbon from the Moors after a four-month siege in what would be their only success during the Second Crusade.
  • 1415 – Hundred Years' War: Henry V of England and his lightly armoured infantry and archers defeated the heavily armoured French cavalry in the Battle of Agincourt on Saint Crispin's Day.
  • 1616 – The Dutch sailing ship Eendracht reached Shark Bay on the western coastline of Australia, as documented on the Hartog Plate etched by explorer Dirk Hartog.
  • 1854 – Charge of the Light Brigade: Lord Cardigan led his cavalry to disaster in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War.
  • 1875 – The first performance of the Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 was given in Boston, USA with Hans von Bülow as soloist.
  • 1922 – The Third Dáil adopted the Constitution of the Irish Free State, based on the requirements of the Anglo-Irish Treaty establishing the first independent Irish state to be recognised by the British.
  • 1924 – The Zinoviev Letter, later found to be a forgery, was published in the Daily Mail, helping to ensure the British Labour Party's defeat in the UK general election four days later.
  • 1971 – The UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, replacing the Republic of China with the People's Republic of China as China's representative at the United Nations.
  • 1980 – Proceedings on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, a multilateral treaty providing an expeditious method to return a child taken from one member nation to another, concluded at The Hague.
  • 1983 – Operation Urgent Fury: The United States and Caribbean allies invaded Grenada, six days after Bernard Coard seized power in a violent coup d'état.
  • 2001 – Windows XP, the then-latest desktop version of the Windows operating system from Microsoft, was released.

October 26

  • 1597 – Imjin War: About twelve Korean ships commanded by Admiral Yi Sun-sin defeated a large Japanese invasion fleet of at least 300 at the Battle of Myeongnyang in the Myeongnyang Strait.
  • 1825 – The Erie Canal, connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and hence the Atlantic Ocean, was opened.
  • 1859 – The passenger ship Royal Charter, en route from Australia to England, was wrecked on the east coast of Anglesey, Wales, killing at least 459 people.
  • 1860 – Having defeated the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Italian military figure Giuseppe Garibaldi shook King of Sardinia Victor Emmanuel's hand in Teano and hailed him as King of Italy.
  • 1863 – The Football Association, one of the oldest governing bodies in association football, was founded at a pub in London's Great Queen Street.
  • 1881 – The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, one of the most famous gunfights in the history of the American Old West, took place in Tombstone, Arizona, between the faction of Wyatt Earp and Ike Clanton's gang.
  • 1937 – Second Sino-Japanese War: Xie Jinyuan and National Revolutionary Army soldiers began the Defence of Sihang Warehouse against waves of Japanese attackers during the Battle of Shanghai.
  • 1944 – World War II: In one of the largest naval battles in modern history, Allied forces defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the seas surrounding the Philippine island of Leyte.
  • 1955 – Ngo Dinh Diem proclaimed himself president of the newly created Republic of Vietnam after defeating former Emperor Bao Dai in a fraudulent referendum supervised by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.
  • 1964 – Australian serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke was executed, the last person to be hanged in the state of Western Australia.
  • 1979 – President Park Chung Hee of South Korea was assassinated by the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and a long-time friend, Kim Jae-kyu.
  • 2000 – Laurent Gbagbo became the first President of Côte d'Ivoire since Robert Guéï was thrown out of power during the 1999 Ivorian coup d'état.
  • 2001 – U.S. President George W. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act into law, significantly expanding the authority of U.S. law enforcement agencies in fighting terrorism in the United States and elsewhere.
  • 2002 – Approximately 40 Chechen rebels and 130 hostages died when Russian forces stormed a theatre building in Moscow to end a four-day hostage siege.

October 27

  • 1275 – The earliest recorded usage of the name "Amsterdam" was made on a certificate by Count Floris V of Holland that granted the inhabitants, who had built a bridge with a dam across the Amstel, an exemption from paying the bridge's tolls.
  • 1553 – Condemned as a heretic for preaching nontrinitarianism and anti-infant baptism, Michael Servetus was burned at the stake outside Geneva.
  • 1644 – English Civil War: The combined armies of Parliament inflicted a tactical defeat on the Royalists, but failed to gain any strategic advantage in the Second Battle of Newbury.
  • 1795 – The United States and Spain signed the Treaty of Madrid, defining the boundaries of the United States with the Spanish colonies and guaranteeing the United States navigation rights on the Mississippi River.
  • 1838 – Governor of Missouri Lilburn Boggs issued the extermination order, ordering all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated.
  • 1904 – The first underground segment of the New York City Subway, today one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the world, opened, connecting New York City Hall with Harlem.
  • 1958 – General Ayub Khan deposed Iskander Mirza in a bloodless coup d'état to become the second President of Pakistan, less than three weeks after Mirza had appointed him the enforcer of martial law.
  • 1961 – NASA launched the first Saturn I rocket, the United States' first dedicated spacecraft designed specifically to launch loads into Earth orbit.
  • 1971 – The Democratic Republic of the Congo was renamed Zaire after a Portuguese mispronunciation of the Kikongo word nzere or nzadi, which translates to "the river that swallows all rivers."
  • 1992 – U.S. Navy Petty Officer Allen R. Schindler, Jr. was killed in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan, a victim of a hate crime for being gay, sparking a national debate that led to the establishment of the U.S. armed forces' "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.

October 28

  • 312 – Constantine the Great defeated Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in Rome.
  • 1886 – In New York Harbour, U.S. President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, to commemorate the centennial of the United States Declaration of Independence.
  • 1918 – Czechoslovakia gained its independence from Austria-Hungary.
  • 1919 – The U.S. Congress passed the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, reinforcing Prohibition in the United States.
  • 1922 – The Fascist Blackshirts marched on Rome to take over the Italian government.
  • 1940 – The Balkans Campaign in World War II: Italy invaded Greece after Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas rejected Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's ultimatum demanding the occupation of Greek territory.
  • 1965 – In St. Louis, Missouri, the 630-foot-tall parabolic steel Gateway Arch was completed.
  • 1965 – Nostra Aetate, the "Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions" of the Second Vatican Council, was promulgated by Pope Paul VI, absolving the Jews of the killing of Jesus, and calling for increased relations with all non-Christian religions.
  • 2007 – In the Argentine general election, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner became the first female to be elected President of Argentina, winning with a 22 percent lead over her nearest rival, one of the widest margins obtained by a candidate since the collapse of the National Reorganisation Process in 1983.

October 29

  • 1268 – Conradin, the last Duke of Swabia, was beheaded in Naples after failing to reclaim Sicily for the House of Hohenstaufen from Charles of Anjou.
  • 1618 – English courtier and explorer Walter Raleigh was executed in London after King James I reinstated a fifteen-year-old death sentence against him.
  • 1787 – The opera Don Giovanni, based on the legendary fictional libertine Don Juan and composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, premiered in the Estates Theatre in Prague.
  • 1886 – New York City office workers spontaneously "invented" the ticker-tape parade.
  • 1923 – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the first President of the Republic of Turkey, a new nation founded from remnants of the Ottoman Empire.
  • 1929 – A catastrophic downturn in the New York Stock Exchange on "Black Tuesday" set off the Great Depression, triggering a chain of bankruptcies and a worldwide economic depression.
  • 1956 – The Suez Crisis began with Israel invading the Sinai Peninsula and pushing Egyptian forces back toward the Suez Canal.
  • 1998 – After more than three decades, 77-year old John Glenn returned to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-95, to study the effects of space flight on the elderly.
  • 1998 – The Truth and Reconciliation Commission presented its report on Apartheid in South Africa, condemning both the Apartheid Government and the African National Congress for committing atrocities.
  • 2004 – Representatives of the member states of the European Union signed the European Constitution in Rome.
  • 2005 – Three explosions in Delhi, India, killed 62 people and injured at least 210 others.
  • 2009 – The World Intellectual Property Organisation issued the final ruling against Glenn Beck in the case Beck v. Eiland-Hall; the decision cited the Supreme Court of the United States case Hustler Magazine v. Falwell as precedent regarding parody and freedom of speech.

October 30

  • 1226 – Tran Thu Do, head of the Tran clan of Vietnam, forced Ly Hue Tong, the last emperor of the Ly dynasty, to commit suicide.
  • 1270 – An agreement between Charles I of Naples, King of Sicily, and Muhammad I al-Mustansir, ruler of the Hafsid dynasty in Ifriqiya, ended the Eighth Crusade and opened up free trade between the Christians and Tunis.
  • 1470 – Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, restored Henry VI as the King of England during the Wars of the Roses.
  • 1863 – Seventeen-year-old Danish Prince Vilhelm arrived in Athens to become George I, King of Greece.
  • 1905 – Russian Revolution: Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly signed the "October Manifesto", establishing the State Duma as the elected legislature in Imperial Russia.
  • 1918 – The Armistice of Mudros was signed in Moudros in the Lesbos Prefecture, Greece, ending the hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I, and paving the way for the occupation of Constantinople and the subsequent partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.
  • 1938 – The radio drama The War of the Worlds, based on the science fiction novella by English writer H. G. Wells, frightened many listeners in the United States into believing that an actual Martian invasion was in progress.
  • 1960 – Surgeon and scientist Michael Woodruff performed the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
  • 1961 – The Soviet hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba was detonated over Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea as a test. With a yield of around 50 megatons, it was the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.
  • 1973 – Istanbul's 1510 metres long Bosporus Bridge was completed, connecting the continents of Europe and Asia over the Bosporus Strait.
  • 1974 – Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman at the Rumble in The Jungle.
  • 1991 – The Madrid Conference, an early attempt by the international community to start a peace process through negotiations involving Israel and the Arab countries, convened in Madrid, Spain.
  • 1995 – In a referendum, the province of Quebec voted by a narrow margin of 50.58 percent in favour of remaining a part of Canada.

October 31

  • 1517 – According to traditional accounts, Martin Luther first posted his Ninety-Five Theses onto the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, present-day Germany, marking the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
  • 1587 – Leiden University Library in Leiden in the Netherlands opened its doors, becoming one of the significant cultural centres in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment.
  • 1863 – The New Zealand land wars resumed as British forces in New Zealand led by General Duncan Cameron began their Invasion of Waikato along the Waikato River.
  • 1864 – Nevada was admitted as the 36th U.S. State, in part to help ensure Abraham Lincoln's re-election as President of the United States eight days later.
  • 1917 – World War I: Allied forces defeated Turkish troops in Beersheba in Southern Palestine at the Battle of Beersheba, often reported as "the last successful cavalry charge in history".
  • 1941 – Over 400 workers completed the 60-foot (18 m) busts of U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
  • 1941 – More than 101 crew members of the USS Reuben James perished when their vessel became the first United States Navy ship sunk by hostile action during World War II after it was torpedoed by the German submarine U-552.
  • 1973 – Three Provisional Irish Republican Army members escaped from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin after a hijacked helicopter landed in the prison's exercise yard.
  • 1984 – Indira Gandhi, India's first and to date only female prime minister, was assassinated by two of her own bodyguards, sparking riots throughout the country.
  • 1999 – All 217 people on board EgyptAir Flight 990 were killed when the aircraft suddenly plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, U.S.
  • 2000 – Singapore Airlines Flight 006 collided with construction equipment while attempting to take off from Taiwan's Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport during heavy rain, killing 79 passengers and 4 crew members.
  • 2003 – After 22 years in power, Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad retired as Prime Minister of Malaysia.
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