This day in history.....

October 20th


1818: Britain and the United States sign a diplomatic convention establishing a boundary between the United States and British Canada along the 49th parallel.


1960: In Providence, Rhode Island, the first fully automated post office system goes into service, electronically sorting and canceling 18,000 pieces of mail per hour.


1973: President Richard Nixon orders Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox over access to Watergate tapes; Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resign.
 
October 21st


1520: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan negotiates the strait between the South American continent and the island of Tierra del Fuego.


1805: The Royal Navy under British Admiral Horatio Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain.


1879: Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb.


1915: The first transatlantic message was transmitted over radio telephone. The call was placed from Arlington, Virginia, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.


1917: The first U.S. Army division enters World War I.


1925: Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company demonstrates the first photoelectric cell.
 
October 22nd


1746: Princeton University is chartered.


1797: André-Jacque Garnerin makes the first successful parachute descent, jumping from a hot air balloon over Paris.


1883: Charles Francois Gounod's Faust is the first opera sung at the Metropolitan Opera House.


1918: The first case of Spanish influenza is reported, beginning a pandemic that will cause an estimated 20 million deaths worldwide.


1938: American inventor Chester F. Carlson makes the first xerox copy.


1962: The Cuban missile crisis begins. United States President John F. Kennedy announces that the USSR has a missile installation in Cuba and declares a naval blockade to prevent missile shipments.
 
October 23



1864: The Battle of Westport is fought in Kansas City, Missouri.


1906: Woman suffragists demonstrate in the outer lobby of the British House of Commons. Ten of the demonstrators are charged the following day and sent to prison.


1924: The first radio network broadcast to the Pacific Coast allows listeners in California, Oregon, and Washington to hear U.S. President Calvin Coolidge dedicate the Chamber of Commerce building in Washington, D.C.


1956: In Budapest, Hungarian students and workers demonstrate against Soviet domination and Communist rule.
 
October 24th


1861: Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line.


1901: Anna Edson Taylor goes over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel, initiating a stunt tradition.


1934: Mohandas Gandhi resigns as leader of the Indian nationalist Congress Party, disillusioned by its use of civil disobedience as a political expedient rather than a fundamental principle.


1945: The United Nations (UN) formally comes into existence.

Wilma makes landfall..........
 
October 27th

1659: William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, are hanged in Massachusetts for their religious beliefs.


1904: The New York subway system opens for business.

1962: American dramatist Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is first performed at the Billy Rose Theater in New York City.


1994: The U.S. prison population tops one million for the first time in American history.


1997: After a record drop in the Dow Jones index, Wall Street cuts off trading for the first time.
 
October 28th


1636: The college that would later be known as Harvard University is founded by an act of the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony.


1886: The Statue of Liberty is formally dedicated by American president Grover Cleveland.


1919: Congress passes the Volstead Act, or National Prohibition Act, over President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the previous day.


1949: Helen Eugenie Moore Anderson is sworn in as the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, becoming the first woman to serve as an American ambassador.


1962: The Cuban missile crisis ends as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announces his government's intent to dismantle and remove all offensive Soviet weapons from Cuba.
 
1659: William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, are hanged in Massachusetts for their religious beliefs.
Click to expand...

Gotta love that New England equality...
 
October 29th


1618: Sir Walter Raleigh, English adventurer, writer, and favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, is beheaded in England under a sentence brought against him fifteen years earlier by King James I.


1923: The Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later known as Atatürk) is elected president of Turkey.


1929: The stock market crashes, heralding the onset of the Great Depression.


1991: The American space probe Galileo takes the first close-up photograph of an asteroid in space.
 
October 30th



1831: Escaped slave Nat Turner is apprehended in Southampton County, Virginia, several weeks after leading the bloodiest slave uprising in American history.


1938: Orson Welles stirs nationwide panic with his "War of the Worlds" radio dramatization.


1961: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushev orders the de-Stalinization of the USSR.


1972: U.S. President Richard Nixon approves legislation to increase Social Security spending by $5.3 billion.
 
October 31st


HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


1517: German theologian and religious reformer Martin Luther publishes his Ninety-Five Theses, denouncing the sale of indulgences (pardons for sins) and stressing salvation through the grace of God alone.


1941: While escorting a convoy of war material to Britain, the destroyer Reuben James is torpedoed and becomes the first U.S. warship to be sunk by hostile action during World War II.


1956: American rear admiral George John Dufek is the first person to land an airplane at the South Pole.


1984: Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.
 
November 1st


1765: Parliament enacts the Stamp Act.


1772: French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier demonstrates that when sulfur or phosphorus burns, the gain in weight is due to its combination with air.


1848: The Boston Female Medical School, the first medical school for women in the United States, opens in Boston, Massachusetts.


1861: George B. McClellan becomes commander in chief of the Union army.


1936: Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini describes the alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as an "axis" running between Berlin and Rome.


1950: Charles Cooper, the first African-American player in the NBA, plays his first game for the Boston Celtics.
 
November 2nd


1889: North Dakota and South Dakota are admitted to the Union.


1920: Warren G. Harding is elected the 29th president of the United States.


1947: Howard Hughes test-flies the "spruce goose," a two-hundred-ton plywood airplane with a wing span longer than a football field.


1948: Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman defeats New York governor Thomas E. Dewey in the U.S. presidential elections.


1948: Margaret Chase Smith is elected to the U.S. Senate.
 
November 3rd



1900: The first automobile show opens in Madison Square Garden in New York.


1903: Panama issues a declaration of independence from Colombia.


1953: The first coast-to-coast live color telecast airs.


1957: The dog Laika becomes the first living creature to travel in space, on board Sputnik 2.


867: Byzantine emperor Basil I deposes Photius as patriarch of Constantinople, ending the schism between Greek and Roman churches.
 
November 4th


1842: Abraham Lincoln marries Lexington-born Mary Todd.


1918: Austria surrenders to the Allies.


1922: British archaeologist Howard Carter discovers the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in Luxor, Egypt.


1952: Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected president of the United States.


1979: Student followers of Ruhollah Khomeini storm the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking hostages.


1995: Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated.
 
November 6th


1860: Abraham Lincoln becomes the 16th president of the United States.


1917: Canadian forces take the village of Passendale in Belgium during the third Battle of Ypres.
 
November 7th


1307: The legendary Swiss archer William Tell is said to have shot Hermann Gessler, the Austrian governor of Tyrol, on this day.


1837: In Alton, Illinois, abolitionist printer Elijah P. Lovejoy is shot to death by a mob while trying to protect his printing shop.

1917: The Bolshevik-led Congress of Soviets comes to power in Russia.


1944: Franklin D. Roosevelt is reelected to a record fourth term as president of the United States.


1989: In New York, former Manhattan borough president David Dinkins becomes the city's first African-American mayor.


1989: In Virginia, Lieutenant Governor Douglas Wilder becomes the first elected African-American state governor in American history.
 
1837: In Alton, Illinois, abolitionist printer Elijah P. Lovejoy is shot to death by a mob while trying to protect his printing shop.


Damn racist Southerners. Trying to protect slavery and all. Might even have been a Klan killing for all we know...
 
November 9th


1923: In Munich, armed policeman and troops loyal to Germany's democratic government crush the Beer Hall putsch (revolt), Hitler's first attempt at seizing control of the German government.


1938: In Germany, Nazis set synagogues on fire, smash the windows of Jewish shops, and arrest thousands of Jews in a single night that comes to be known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.


1965: New York and much of the northeast coast of North America suffer the largest power failure in history, leaving thirty million people in the dark.


1989: German citizens begin to demolish the Berlin Wall, which has separated East Germany from West Germany since 1961.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top