- 456 – Ricimer defeats Avitus at Piacenza and becomes master of the Western Roman Empire.[1]
- 690 – Empress Wu Zetian ascends to the throne of the Tang dynasty and proclaims herself ruler of the Chinese Empire.
- 912 – Abd ar-Rahman III becomes the eighth Emir of Córdoba.[2]
- 955 – King Otto I defeats a Slavic revolt in what is now Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
- 1311 – The Council of Vienne convenes for the first time.[3]
- 1384 – Jadwiga is crowned King of Poland, although she is a woman.
- 1590 – Prince Gesualdo of Venosa murders his wife and her lover.
- 1736 – Mathematician William Whiston‘s predicted comet fails to strike the Earth.[4]
- 1780 – American Revolutionary War: The British-led Royalton raid is the last Native American raid on New England.
- 1780 – The Great Hurricane of 1780 finishes after its sixth day, killing between 20,000 and 24,000 residents of the Lesser Antilles.[5]
- 1793 – French Revolution: Queen Marie Antoinette is executed.
- 1793 – War of the First Coalition: French victory at the Battle of Wattignies forces Austria to raise the siege of Maubeuge.
- 1805 – War of the Third Coalition: Napoleon surrounds the Austrian army at Ulm.[6]
- 1813 – The Sixth Coalition attacks Napoleon in the three-day Battle of Leipzig.
- 1817 – Simón Bolívar sentences Manuel Piar to death for challenging the racial-caste in Venezuela.[7]
- 1834 – Much of the ancient structure of the Palace of Westminster in London burns to the ground.
- 1836 – Great Trek: Afrikaner voortrekkers repulse a Matabele attack, but lose their livestock.
- 1841 – Queen’s University is founded in the Province of Canada.
- 1843 – William Rowan Hamilton invents quaternions, a three-dimensional system of complex numbers.
- 1846 – William T. G. Morton administers ether anesthesia during a surgical operation.
- 1847 – The novel Jane Eyre is published in London.
- 1859 – John Brown leads a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
- 1869 – The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous American hoaxes, is “discovered”.
- 1869 – Girton College, Cambridge is founded, becoming England’s first residential college for women.
- 1875 – Brigham Young University is founded in Provo, Utah.
- 1882 – The Nickel Plate Railroad opens for business.
- 1905 – The Partition of Bengal in India takes place.
- 1909 – William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz hold the first summit between a U.S. and a Mexican president. They narrowly escape assassination.[8]
- 1916 – Margaret Sanger opens the first family planning clinic in the United States.
- 1919 – Adolf Hitler delivers his first public address at a meeting of the German Workers’ Party.[9]
- 1923 – The Walt Disney Company is founded.
- 1934 – Chinese Communists begin the Long March to escape Nationalist encirclement.
- 1939 – World War II: No. 603 Squadron RAF intercepts the first Luftwaffe raid on Britain.
- 1940 – Holocaust in Poland: The Warsaw Ghetto is established.
- 1943 – Holocaust in Italy: Raid of the Ghetto of Rome.
- 1946 – Nuremberg trials: Ten defendants found guilty by the International Military Tribunal are executed by hanging.
- 1947 – The Philippines takes over the administration of the Turtle Islands and the Mangsee Islands from the United Kingdom.
- 1949 – The Greek Communist Party announces a “temporary cease-fire”, thus ending the Greek Civil War.
- 1951 – The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, is assassinated in Rawalpindi.
- 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis begins: U.S. President John F. Kennedy is informed of photos taken on October 14 by a U-2 showing nuclear missiles (the crisis will last for 13 days starting from this point).
- 1964 – China detonates its first nuclear weapon.
- 1964 – Leonid Brezhnev becomes leader of the Soviet Communist Party, while Alexei Kosygin becomes the head of government.
- 1968 – Tommie Smith and John Carlos are ejected from the US Olympic team for participating in the Olympics Black Power salute.
- 1968 – Kingston, Jamaica is rocked by the Rodney riots, inspired by the barring of Walter Rodney from the country.
- 1968 – Yasunari Kawabata becomes the first Japanese person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
- 1970 – Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invokes the War Measures Act during the October Crisis.
- 1973 – Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
- 1975 – Indonesian troops kill the Balibo Five, a group of Australian journalists, in Portuguese Timor.
- 1975 – Three-year-old Rahima Banu, from Bangladesh, is the last known case of naturally occurring smallpox.
- 1975 – The Australian Coalition sparks a constitutional crisis when they vote to defer funding for the government’s annual budget.
- 1978 – Pope John Paul II becomes the first non-Italian pontiff since 1523.
- 1984 – Desmond Tutu is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
- 1991 – George Hennard runs amok in Killeen, Texas, killing 23 and wounding 20.
- 1995 – The Million Man March takes place in Washington, D.C. About 837,000 attend.[10]
- 1995 – The Skye Bridge in Scotland is opened.
- 1996 – Eighty-four football fans die and 180 are injured in a massive crush at a match in Guatemala City.
- 1998 – Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London on a murder extradition warrant.
- 2002 – The Bibliotheca Alexandrina opens in Egypt, commemorating the ancient library of Alexandria.
- 2013 – Lao Airlines Flight 301 crashes on approach to Pakse International Airport in Laos, killing 49 people.
- 2017 – Storm Ophelia strikes the U.K. and Ireland causing major damage and power loss.
-Source: wikipedia
