This day in history.....

October 3rd


1922: Rebecca L. Felton becomes the first female senator in U.S. history.


1929: The name of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes is changed to Yugoslavia as part of King Alexander I's attempts to end ethnic divisions within the country.


1935: Italy invades Ethiopia.


1952: Britain successfully tests its first atomic bomb off the coast of Australia.


1974: Frank Robinson is named manager of the Cleveland Indians, becoming the first black American to take charge of a major league baseball team.

1990: East and West Germany are formally reunited.
 
October 4th


1777: In Pennsylvania, the Battle of Germantown is fought.


1895: Horace Rawlins receives $150 as the winner of the inaugural U.S. Open golf championship.


1909: The first airship race in the United States begins in St. Louis, Missouri. Four hydrogen-filled dirigibles compete for a prize of $1,000.

1957: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1 into orbit.


1958: Transatlantic jet service begins.


1965: Pope Paul VI makes the first papal visit to the United States, attending a public mass in Yankee Stadium before departing.
 
Also -


In 1626 Richard Cromwell, lord protector of England (1658-59), born.
In 1824 Mexico becomes a republic.

In 1883 The 'Orient Express' begins its first run, linking Turkey to Europe by rail.
In 1895 Buster Keaton, silent movie actor (The Navigator, Steamboat Bill), born.
In 1923 Charlton Heston, actor (Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Planet of the Apes), born.
In 1931 The comic strip Dick Tracy debuts.

In 1957 Leave It to Beaver debuts on CBS.

In 1959 USSR Luna 3 sent back first photos of Moon's far side.

In 1970 Janis Joplin dies at age 27.
In 1985 21st Space Shuttle Mission - Atlantis 1 is launched.
In 1989 Graham Chapman, member of the Monty Python team, dies from cancer.
 
October 5th


1434: The Florentine banker Cosimo de' Medici returns from exile to Florence, becoming its effective ruler. The oligarchy is overthrown, and his rival the political leader Palla Strozzi is banished.

1793: The revolutionary government in France abolishes Christianity.

1796: Spain declares war on Britain.


1877: Nez Perce Chief Joseph surrenders to the U.S. Army with the words “I will fight no more forever.”


1921: The WJZ radio station in Newark, New Jersey, broadcasts the first radio play-by-play coverage of the World Series, between the New York Giants and the New York Yankees.


1947: Harry S. Truman makes the first televised presidential address.


2001: Slugger Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants sets the single-season record for home runs with his 71st and 72nd. Bonds hits number 73 two days later in the season's final game.
 
October 6th


1683: The first German Mennonite settlers arrive in America. They will establish Germantown, outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1876: A group of public and university librarians establish the American Library Association to promote the enjoyment of reading.

1927: The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, debuts in New York. It is the first "talkie," or full-length film featuring audible dialogue.


1973: Full-scale war erupts in the Middle East, as Egypt and Syria attack Israel while Israelis are observing the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.


1981: Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat is assassinated by Muslim extremists.
 
October 7th


1571: The Battle of Lepanto, the first major victory of the Christians against the Ottoman Empire, is fought.


1765: Delegates from nine American colonies meet in New York City to respond to the Stamp Act. In the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, the Stamp Act Congress resolves to boycott goods subject to the tax.

1950: Under General Douglas MacArthur, the first American tank crew crosses the 38th parallel and invades North Korea.
 
October 8th


1871: The great Chicago fire starts.


1919: Sixty-three planes take off from San Francisco and New York in the first transcontinental air race in the United States.


1928: Police raid 20 speakeasies in New York City in an effort to crack down on illegal liquor sales.


1956: New York Yankees pitcher Donald James Larson pitches the first perfect game in a World Series--no walks, no hits, no runs.


Today's Web Pick

The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
On this day in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire broke out. It burned for two days, killing over 250 people and destroying about a third of the city center.
 
October 10


1845: The Naval School (later the U.S. Naval Academy) opens in Annapolis, Maryland.

1871: The great Chicago fire is put out; it has destroyed nearly a third of central Chicago.


1886: The first tuxedo is worn at a dinner club in New York.

1913: The Panama Canal, an American-built waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, is completed with the explosion of the Gamboa Dike.


1973: After pleading no contest to tax evasion, Spiro Agnew becomes the first U.S. vice president to resign in disgrace.


1995: The opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is reinstated as general secretary of the National League for Democracy in Myanmar.
 
October 11th


1811: American inventor John Stevens and his son Robert Livingston Stevens operate the first steam-propelled ferryboat between New York City and Hoboken, New Jersey.


1980: The Soviet cosmonauts Valery V. Ryumin and Leonid I. Popov return to Earth after a record 185 days in space aboard Salyut 6.

1988: Mathematicians use a network of computers in the United States, Europe, and Australia to factor a 100-digit number for the first time.


1992: ACT UP New York holds its first political funeral.
 
October 13th


1775: The Continental Congress authorizes construction and administration of the first American naval force.


1792: In Washington, D.C., the cornerstone of the White House is laid.


1843: B'nai B'rith, the oldest secular Jewish organization in the United States, is founded in New York City.


1923: Ankara becomes the capital of modern Turkey, succeeding the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (modern Istanbul).


1943: Italy, switching allegiances, declares war on Germany.


1964: The Voskhod 1, the first spacecraft to carry a multi-person crew, returns to earth.
 
October


1914: The U.S. House of Representatives approves the Clayton Antitrust Act.


1917: Dutch courtesan Mata Hari is executed by the French after being suspected of spying for Germany.


1928: The Graf Zeppelin makes the first commercial transatlantic flight.


1945: Pierre Laval, prime minister of Nazi-occupied Vichy France, is executed by a firing squad for treason against France.


1946: Hermann Wilhelm Göring, the second most powerful leader of Nazi Germany, poisons himself hours before his scheduled execution for war crimes during World War II.


1964: Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev is deposed.
 
October 16th


1701: The Collegiate School of America, later Yale University, is founded by Congregationalists who are unhappy with the more liberal Harvard.


1793: Marie-Antoinette, queen consort of Louis XVI of France, is guillotined in Paris for treason.


1859: Planning to free Virginian slaves by armed force, American abolitionist John Brown seizes a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.


1916: In New York City, Fania Mindell, Ethel Byrne, and Margaret Sanger open the first birth control clinic. :hippy:


1946: In Nürnberg, Germany, ten high-ranking Nazi officials are executed by hanging for their war crimes during World War II.


1984: Dr. Leonard L. Bailey performs the first transplant of a baboon heart into a human at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California.
 
October 17th


1604: King James I writes his Counterblast to Tobacco, condemning the increasingly popular habit of smoking, in Britain.


1777: The Battles of Saratoga end.


1931: Al Capone is jailed for tax evasion.


1933: German-born physicist Albert Einstein emigrates to the United States.


1973: The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) suspends oil exports to nations that supported Israel in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. Oil prices rise dramatically.


1989: An earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale strikes San Francisco, California.
 
October 18th

1767: The Mason-Dixon Line is established.


1842: American inventor Samuel Morse lays the first telegraph cable.


1867: The United States officially takes ownership of the territory of Alaska.


1873: Representatives from Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, and Yale universities formulate rules for the game of football.


1898: American troops raise the U.S. flag over Puerto Rico.


1981: General Wojciech Jaruzelski, prime minister of Poland, succeeds Stanislaw Kania as first secretary of the Polish Communist Party.
 
october 19th


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.
 
Edison didn't invent it. Some poor unnamed wage slave in his invention factory did, and he filed the patent.
 
October


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.
 
October 26th


1825: The Erie Canal officially opens, providing inland water transportation between the East Coast and the Great Lakes region.
Today is the anniversary of the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Learn the history of this engineering marvel at this official New York State web site.


1877: British surgeon Joseph Lister performs the first operation to repair a fractured kneecap.
 
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