Category: This Day in History (Page 2 of 25)

On Oct. 19, 1781, British troops under Gen. Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, as the American Revolution neared its end.

In 1789, John Jay was sworn in as the first Chief Justice of the United States.

In 1944, the U.S. Navy began accepting Black women into WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service).

In 1950, during the Korean Conflict, United Nations forces entered the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.

In 1953, the Ray Bradbury novel “Fahrenheit 451,” set in a dystopian future where books are banned and burned by the government, was first published by Ballantine Books.

In 1960, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during a sit-down protest at a lunch counter in Atlanta. (Sent to prison for a parole violation over a traffic offense, King was released after three days following an appeal by Robert F. Kennedy.)

In 1966, The Yardbirds arrived in New York for their first US tour with Beck and Jimmy Page on lead guitars. After two dates of the tour, Beck developed acute tonsillitis and quit the group. He would go on to form The Jeff Beck Group, that gave Rod Stewart his first major exposure.

In 1977, the supersonic Concorde made its first landing in New York City.

In 1987, the stock market crashed as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 508 points, or 22.6 percent in value (its biggest daily percentage loss), to close at 1,738.74 in what came to be known as “Black Monday.”

In 2002, in York, Pa., former mayor Charlie Robertson was acquitted and two other men were convicted in the shotgun slaying of Lillie Belle Allen, a young Black woman, during race riots that tore the city apart in 1969.

In 2001, U.S. special forces began operations on the ground in Afghanistan, opening a significant new phase of the assault against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

In 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa during a ceremony in St. Peter’s Square.

In 2010, the Pentagon directed the military to accept openly gay recruits for the first time in the nation’s history.

In 2015, Canadians voted for a sharp change in their government as the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau, the son of a former prime minister, won a landslide victory to end Conservative Stephen Harper’s near decade in office.

On October 5, 1892, the Dalton Gang, notorious for its train robberies, was practically wiped out while attempting to rob a pair of banks in Coffeyville, Kansas.

In 1947, President Harry S. Truman delivered the first televised White House address as he spoke on the world food crisis.

1953, Earl Warren was sworn in as the 14th chief justice of the United States, succeeding Fred M. Vinson.

In 1958, racially-desegregated Clinton High School in Clinton, Tennessee, was nearly leveled by an early morning bombing.

In 1983, Solidarity founder Lech Walesa (lek vah-WEN’-sah) was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1989, a jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, convicted former P-T-L evangelist Jim Bakker of using his television show to defraud followers. (Sentenced to 45 years in prison, Bakker was freed in December 1994 after serving 4 1/2 years.)

In 1994, 48 people were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide carried out simultaneously in two Swiss villages by members of a secret religious doomsday cult known as the Order of the Solar Temple.

In 2001, tabloid photo editor Robert Stevens died from inhaled anthrax, the first of a series of anthrax cases in Florida, New York, New Jersey and Washington.

In 2005, defying the White House, senators voted 90-9 to approve an amendment sponsored by Republican Sen. John McCain that would prohibit the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in U.S. government custody.

In 2011, Steve Jobs the Apple founder and former chief executive who’d invented and master-marketed ever sleeker gadgets that transformed everyday technology from the personal computer to the iPod and iPhone, died in Palo Alto, California at age 56.

In 2015, the United States, Japan and 10 other nations in Asia and the Americas reached agreement on the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

In 2017, Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein announced that he was taking a leave of absence from his company after a New York Times article detailed decades of alleged sexual harassment against women.

In 2018, a jury in Chicago convicted white police officer Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder in the 2014 shooting of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.

In 2020, President Donald Trump made a dramatic return to the White House after leaving the military hospital where he was receiving an unprecedented level of care for COVID-19.

In 2021, a former Facebook employee, data scientist Frances Haugen, told a Senate panel that the company knew that its platform spread misinformation and content that harmed children, but that it refused to make changes that could hurt its profits.

In 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the final papers to annex four regions of Ukraine while his military struggled to control the new territory.

On October 4 1777, Gen. George Washington’s troops launched an assault on the British at Germantown, Pennsylvania, resulting in heavy American casualties.

In 1887, the International Herald Tribune had its beginnings as the Paris Herald, a European edition of the New York Herald.

In 1940, Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini conferred at Brenner Pass in the Alps.

In 1957, the Space Age began as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit.

In 1965, Pope Paul VI became the first pope to visit the Western Hemisphere as he addressed the U.N. General Assembly.

In 1970, rock singer Janis Joplin was found dead in her Hollywood hotel room at age 27.

In 1990, for the first time in nearly six decades, German lawmakers met in the Reichstag for the first meeting of the nation’s reunified parliament.

In 1991, 26 nations, including the United States, signed the Madrid Protocol, which imposed a 50-year ban on oil exploration and mining in Antarctica.

In 2001, a Russian airliner flying from Israel to Siberia was accidentally downed by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile over the Black Sea, killing all 78 people aboard.

In 2002, “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh received a 20-year sentence after a sobbing plea for forgiveness before a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia. (He was released from prison in May, 2019.) In a federal court in Boston, a laughing Richard Reid pleaded guilty to trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight with explosives in his shoes (the British citizen was later sentenced to life in prison).

In 2004, the SpaceShipOne rocket plane broke through Earth’s atmosphere to the edge of space for the second time in five days, capturing the $10 million Ansari X prize aimed at opening the final frontier to tourists.

In 2010, the Supreme Court began a new era with three women serving together for the first time as Elena Kagan took her place at the end of the bench.

In 2013, Vo Nguyen Giap, the military commander who’d led Vietnamese Communist forces against the French and then the Americans, died in Hanoi at age 102.

In 2017, President Donald Trump visited hospital bedsides and a police base in Las Vegas in the aftermath of the shooting rampage three nights earlier that left 58 people dead.

In 2020, infected and contagious, President Donald Trump briefly ventured out in an SUV from the hospital where he was being treated for COVID-19 to salute cheering supporters. Trump’s medical team reported that his blood oxygen level had dropped suddenly twice in recent days and that they gave him a steroid typically only recommended for the very sick.

In 2022, Elon Musk abandoned his legal battle to back out of buying Twitter and offered to go through with his original $44 billion bid for the social media platform.

On Oct. 1, 1908, Henry Ford introduced his Model T automobile to the market.

In 1910, the offices of the Los Angeles Times were destroyed by a bomb explosion and fire; 21 Times employees were killed.

In 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China during a ceremony in Beijing. Also in 1949, a 42-day strike by the United Steelworkers of America began over the issue of retirement benefits.

In 1955, the situation comedy “The Honeymooners,” starring Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows and Joyce Randolph, premiered on CBS-TV.

In 1957, the motto “In God We Trust” began appearing on U.S. paper currency.

In 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1971, Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, Florida.

In 1987, eight people were killed when an earthquake measuring magnitude 5.9 struck the Los Angeles area.

In 1994, National Hockey League team owners began a 103-day lockout of their players.

In 1996, a federal grand jury indicted Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski in the 1994 mail bomb slaying of advertising executive Thomas Mosser. (Kaczynski was later sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years.) Also in 1996, the federal minimum wage rose 50 cents to four dollars, 75 cents an hour.

In 2015, a gunman opened fire at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, killing nine people and then himself. Officials in Michigan declared a public health emergency over the city of Flint’s water in response to tests that showed children with elevated levels of lead.

In 2017, a gunman opened fire from a room at the Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans at a concert below, leaving 58 people dead and more than 800 injured in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history; the gunman, 64-year-old Stephen Craig Paddock, killed himself before officers arrived.

In 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was diagnosed with a heart attack at a Las Vegas hospital, where he’d been taken after experiencing chest discomfort at a campaign event; doctors inserted two stents to open up a blocked artery.