Historic Event
1492 Christopher Columbus misses Florida when he changes course
Historic Discovery
1542 Explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo discovers Catalina Island off the coast of California
Lepanto – The Battle That Saved Europe
1571 Battle of Lepanto: Holy League of southern European nations formed by Pope Pius V destroy an Ottoman fleet in a significant loss off Western Greece
Historic Event
1637 Prince Frederick Henry occupies Breda
Historic Event
1763 George III of Great Britain issues Proclamation of 1763, closing lands in North America north and west of Alleghenies to white settlement
- 1765 Stamp Act Congress (First Congress of the American Colonies) convenes in New York City to devise a unified protest against new British taxation
- 1777 Americans beat British in Second Battle of Saratoga & Battle of Bemis Heights
- 1780 British defeated by American militia near Kings Mountain, SC
- 1806 Carbon paper patented in London by inventor Ralph Wedgwood
- 1816 1st double decked steamboat, Washington, arrives in New Orleans
- 1825 Miramichi Fire - forest fire disaster in New Brunswick
- 1826 Granite Railway (1st chartered railway in US) begins operations
- 1828 The Greek city of Patras is liberated by the French expeditionary force in Peloponnese under General Maison.
- 1830 The Black Line begins; a leveé of colonists in Tasmania, Australia, attempts to round up Aborigines onto the Tasman Peninsula [1]
- 1840 Willem I resigns as king of Netherlands
- 1856 Cyrus Chambers Jr patents folding machine that folds book & newspapers
- 1864 -Oct 13th) Battle of Darbytown Road, Virginia
- 1864 Naval Engagement at Bahia Harbor, Brazil - CSS Florida vs USS Wachusett
- 1868 Cornell University (Ithaca NY) opens
- 1870 Leon Gambetta flees Paris in balloon
- 1871 16-hour fire injures 30 of Chicago's 185 firefighters
- 1879 Germany & Austrian-Hungary sign Twofold Covenant
- 1886 Spain abolishes slavery in Cuba
- 1900 The term "orienteering" is first used for an event
Historic Event
1915 English nurse Edith Cavell sentenced to death along with 34 others by German court martial for running underground network to free Allied soldiers
- 1916 The German submarine U-53 arrives off Newport, Rhode Island, and sinks 9 British merchant ships in international waters
- 1919 First London-Amsterdam airline service (British Aerial Transport & KLM)
- 1919 Fritz Kreisler & F Jacobi's "Apple Blossoms" premieres in NYC
- 1919 KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, established (oldest existing airline)
- 1922 Oud-burgem of Rotterdam Zimmerman becomes High Comm's of Austria
- 1924 Greek government of Dikalekopoulis forms
- 1926 Italian Great Fascist Council forms
- 1928 Race Tafari Makonnen crowned king of Abyssinia
Historic Event
1929 Ramsay MacDonald is first British Prime Minister to address US Congress
- 1931 1st infra-red photograph, Rochester, NY
- 1937 Johan Wagenaar's "Feestmars" premieres in Amsterdam
- 1938 Germany requires all Jewish passports be stamped with letter J
- 1940 World War II: the McCollum memo proposes bringing the U.S. into the war in Europe by provoking the Japanese to attack the United States.
- 1941 German army occupies Viarma, USSR
- 1942 1 salvo Katjoesja-rocket destroys Nazi battalion in Stalingrad
- 1942 Last camouflaged German raider Komet leaves Flushing (Netherlands)
Historic Event
1942 Maxwell Anderson's "Eve of St Mark" premieres in NYC
- 1942 US & UK government announce establishment of United Nations
- 1944 Allies bombs sea dikes at Vlissingen
Historic Event
1944 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel ordered to return to Berlin
- 1944 Riots in Amersfoort/Utrecht/Strugle
- 1945 Dutch author A M de Jong's murderer Ton van Gog escapes
- 1949 German Democratic Republic formed from Russian occupation zone (National Day). Wilhelm Pieck becomes 1st president, Otto Greatwohl 1st premier
- 1950 US forces invade North Korea by crossing 38th parallel
- 1950 Walter Bedell Smith replaces Roscoe H Hillenkoetter as 4th CIA head
- 1950 William H Jackson becomes deputy director of CIA
Historic Event
1951 David Ben-Gurion forms 3rd Israeli government
- 1954 Hassan el Hodeiby, leader of the Muslim Brothership, arrested in Egypt
- 1955 Aircraft carrier USS Saratoga launched at Brooklyn
Historic Event
1955 Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reads his poem "Howl" for the first time at a poetry reading in San Francisco.
- 1958 Potter Stewart appointed to US Supreme Court
- 1958 US manned space-flight project renamed Project Mercury
Far Side of the Moon Revealed
1959 Far side of Moon seen for the 1st time, courtesy of USSR's Luna 3 space probe
Historic Event
1960 JFK and Richard Nixon's second presidential debate
- 1962 USSR performs nuclear test at Novaya Zemlya USSR
- 1963 Bobby Baker resigns as Senate Democratic secretary
- 1963 Hurricane Flora hits Haiti & Dominican Republic, kills 7,190
- 1963 JFK signs ratification for nuclear test ban treaty
- 1965 50 mph gust helps Robert Mitera ace 447-yd 10th hole at Miracle Hills, Omaha, Nebr to score world's longest straight hole-in-one
- 1965 Charles Linster does 6,006 consecutive push-ups
- 1967 Rolf Hochhuth's play "Soldaten" premieres in West Berlin
- 1968 Motion Picture Association of America adopts film rating system
- 1968 Rioting continues in Derry, Northern Ireland after Royal Ulster Constabulary put down civil rights march two days earlier
Meeting of Interest
1971 Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner meets with British Prime Minister Edward Heath; they agree to send an additional 1,500 British Army troops to Northern Ireland
Historic Event
1976 Hua Guofeng succeeds Mao as Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
Historic Event
1981 Hosni Mubarak becomes acting-president of Egypt
Historic Event
1982 Olof Palme forms Swedish government
- 1985 21st NASA Space Shuttle Mission (51-J): Atlantis 1 lands at Edwards AFB
- 1985 KHQ-AM in Spokane Wash's final transmission
- 1985 PLO terrorists seize Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro
- 1986 First edition of new British newspaper "Independent" published
- 1988 Latvian flag raised in Riga for first time since annexation by USSR
- 1990 Israel begins handing out gas masks to its citizens
- 1991 Child star Adam Rich (Eight Is Enough) arrested for stealing hypodermics
Historic Event
1991 Law Professor Anita Hill accuses Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of making sexually inappropriate comments to her
- 1993 Massive Muslim demonstration in Xining, China, 12 killed
Nobel Prize
1993 Nobel prize for literature awarded to American writer Toni Morrison
- 1994 China performs nuclear test at Lop Nor, PRC
- 1994 Faud Guliyev appointed premier of Azerbijan
- 1994 Ingvar Carlsson forms Swedish government
- 1994 Lu Bin swims female 200m medley world record (2:11.57)
Historic Event
1996 Rupert Murdoch launches Fox News with Roger Ailes as CEO
- 1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, is found tied to a fence after being savagely beaten by two young adults in Laramie, Wyoming.
- 2001 Crude oil resumes flowing through the trans-Alaska pipeline after workers welded shut a bullet hole that caused 260,000 US gallons of oil to spill out
- 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan starts with an air assault and covert operations on the ground
Historic Event
2004 King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia abdicates
Historic Publication
2009 A digital version of psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung's 'Red Book' is published 48 years after his death and contains personal notes on his subconscious during the period in which he developed his principal theories
Nobel Prize
2010 Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat" [1]
- 2012 13 people are killed after a Sudanese military aeroplane crashes near Khartoum
- 2012 Sébastien Loeb wins the World Rally Championship for the ninth consecutive year
- 2013 James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof win the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on transport systems in cells
- 2013 Mulatu Teshome becomes president of Ethiopia
- 2014 Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura win the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing blue light emitting diodes
- 2014 Spanish nurse diagnosed with Ebola, the first case outside west Africa
- 2015 Nobel prize in Chemistry awarded to Tomas Lindahl (Sweden), Paul Modrich (US) and Aziz Sancar (Turkey) for work on cells DNA repair
Historic Event
2015 US President Barack Obama apologises to Doctors without Borders President and the President of Afghanistan for the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz
- 2016 Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos wins the Nobel Peace Prize for attempts to end conflict with FARC
Historic Event
2016 Washington Post releases videotape of Donald Trump boasting of groping and kissing women without consent
- 2018 China confirms it has detained Interpol chief Meng Hongwei, who resigns from his position after being reported missing
- 2018 Limousine crash kills 20 people, including two pedestrians in Schoharie, New York
- 2018 Romanian referendum to ban same sex marriage fails with only 20.4% voting
- 2019 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology awarded to Peter Ratcliffe, William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza for discovering how cells sense oxygen
- 2020 Hurricane Delta makes landfall on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, with 100-mph winds, the 25th named storm for 2020
- 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier, and Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing”
- 2021 Zanzibar born writer Abdulrazak Gurnah is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature [1]
- 2022 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, Russian human rights organisation Memorial and Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties [1]