This Day In History

[Raissermesser]

October 12

539 BC - On this date, the army of Cyrus the Great diverted the Euphrates River, and marched into Babylon on the river bed. They met little resistance, with most of the city drunk from a celebration. One account has that the ruler was waiting, armed, and died in what little fighting there was. Why was he waiting with his sword and wasn't drunk? Maybe because he already knew the city would fall that very night. His name was Belshazzar, and while some pooh-pooh the account in the 5th chapter of the Book of Daniel, it's an interesting observation.

1492 - On this date Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World. While he's fallen out of favor by some in the US, it remains that Columbus Day is the perfect holiday for college students. When he left he didn't know where he was going; when he got there, he didn't know where he was; when he came back he didn't know where he'd been; and he did it all with somebody else's money.

1810 - Bottom's Up. First Oktoberfest was held on this day in Munich, Germany.

1918 - The Cloquet Fire claims 435 lives in Minnesota. Approximately 390 square miles are burned in the forest fire. It remains the worst natural disaster in terms of lives lost in a single day in Minnesota.

1933 - Alcatraz Citadel becomes a Federal prison.

1960 - They didn't. Khrushchev pounds his shoe on the lecturn at the UN and says "We will bury you!" Mental Fluff: On another date, Khrushchev and Eisenhower joked about comparing records to end double-dipping by double agents. Yes, that actually happened.

2000 - The attack on the USS Cole happened on this day.

 

[Raissermesser]

October 14 - The Jester and the General.

On this day in 1066, the jester Ivo Taillefer died at the end of his performance in front of the English army, and changed the course of history. The place was Hastings, and the armies of Harold II of England and William of Normandy had met on the battlefield. Harold II had better position, and that made the Norman army hesitant to move forward. It was then that Ivo Taillefer, a Norman jester, rode out alone to the English lines. There he juggled his sword as he sang The Song of Roland. When an English soldier challenged him, Taillefer killed him, and charged the English army to take them on as well.

Things worked about about as well as you'd think. The English killed Taillefer. But it was just the nudge the Normans needed, and they met the English in battle. By the end of the day, Harold II was dead, his army routed, and William of Normandy well on his way to conquer England.

It was also on this day in 1890 that Dwight David Eisenhower was born, and the two would become linked by coincidence. Taillefer comes from the Latin term "iron hewer." Eisenhower comes from the same term in German. Taillefer came from Normandy to England in 1066, and Eisenhower came to Normandy from England in 1944.

 

[Raissermesser]

October 14

On this day in 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first man to officially break the sound barrier. The day before he had broken two ribs while riding, and smuggled part of a broom stick into the cockpit of the Bell X1 aircraft Glamorous Glennis. Yeager used it to help secure the hatch.

There's some speculation that pilots in the P51 Mustang might have broken the sound barrier in power dives. IIRC, that's never really been settled. Corrections welcome.

 

[Mr. Scruffy]

October 16

1793 - Nine months after the execution of her husband, the former King Louis XVI of France, Marie Antoinette follows him to the guillotine.

1813 - Battle of Leipzig begins on this day and would continue through October 19 at Leipzig, Saxony. The coalition armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden, led by Tsar Alexander I of Russia and Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg, decisively defeated the French army of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. The battle was the culmination of the German campaign of 1813 and involved 600,000 soldiers, 2,200 artillery pieces, the expenditure of 200,000 rounds of artillery ammunition and 127,000 casualties, making it the largest battle in Europe prior to World War I.

1859 - Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to start an armed slave revolt and destroy the institution of slavery.

 

[Mr. Scruffy]

October 18

1867 - The U.S. formally takes possession of Alaska after purchasing the territory from Russia for $7.2 million, or less than two cents an acre. The Alaska purchase comprised 586,412 square miles, about twice the size of Texas, and was championed by William Henry Seward, the enthusiastically expansionist secretary of state under President Andrew Johnson.

1955 - The antiproton is first experimentally confirmed in 1955 at the Bevatron particle accelerator by University of California, Berkeley physicists Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain, for which they were awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics.

 

[Doc4]

Amusing in an ironic way, people profiting off the memory of a Marxist.

768 - Charlemagne and his brother Carloman I are crowned Kings of The Franks. Carloman's sudden death in December 771 under unexplained circumstances left Charlemagne the sole ruler of the Frankish Kingdom.

 

[Raissermesser]

October 18

1867 - The U.S. formally takes possession of Alaska after purchasing the territory from Russia for $7.2 million, or less than two cents an acre. The Alaska purchase comprised 586,412 square miles, about twice the size of Texas, and was championed by William Henry Seward, the enthusiastically expansionist secretary of state under President Andrew Johnson.

The first US governor of the Alaska territory was Jefferson Davis. No, not that Jefferson Davis. Jefferson C. Davis was Union officer during the Civil War, who got into a fight with his commanding officer and shot and killed him. Davis would serve under William T. Sherman, and became embroiled in an incident at Ebenezer Creek in Georgia. Slaves along Sherman's March were encouraged by Union troops to leave, but many ended up following the Union columns. At Ebenezer Creek, Davis had his men build a pontoon bridge, under sporadic fire from Confederate cavalryman Joe Wheeler's* forces. When Davis and his men crossed, he had the pontoon bridge cut loose, stranding the former slaves on the far bank between him and Wheeler. The blacks jumped into the creek to escape; some drowned. Quite a scandal, one picked up by the Northern press.

Not three years later, Jefferson C. Davis was appointed the first US governor of the Alaska territory, a place many at the time dismissed as Seward's Folly. Make of it what you will.

 

[shavefan]

I really enjoy this thread. Many thanks to all that take the time to post and share.

 

[Mr. Scruffy]

October 29

539 BC - King Cyrus "the Great" of Persia marches into Babylon. After taking Babylon, Cyrus the Great proclaimed himself "king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four corners of the world". Cyrus the Great's dominions composed the largest empire the world had ever seen. At the end of Cyrus' rule, the Achaemenid Empire stretched from Asia Minor in the west to the Indus River in the east.

1618 - English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded in the Old Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster for his involvement in the Main Plot against Queen Elizabeth's successor, James I.

1929 - Black Tuesday hits Wall Street as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression.

1998 - Space Shuttle Discovery blasts off on STS-95 with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space.

 

[Raissermesser]

1969 - Charles Kline sends the first message over ARPANET, from the mainframe at the University of California to the mainframe at Stanford. The message was "LO." He was attempting to type LOGIN, but the network crashed before he could finish. Later that night, he successfully sent the word LOGIN. ARPANET would later become the Internet.

 

[Mick]

October 29, 1888.

Lord Salisbury grants Cecil Rhodes a charter for the British South Africa Company.

 

[Mick]

Orson Welles broadcast "War of the Worlds"

October 30, 1938 (8-9pm eastern time)

 

[MVeeI]

October 31, 1922

Benito Mussolini becomes Prime Minister of Italy.

 

[Mr. Scruffy]

October 31

1517 - Martin Luther sends his 95 theses to Albrecht von Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz, precipitating the Protestant Reformation

1984 - Indira Gandhi is assassinated in New Delhi by two of her own bodyguards. Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, both Sikhs, emptied their guns into Gandhi as she walked to her office from an adjoining bungalow. Although the two assailants immediately surrendered, they were both shot in a subsequent scuffle, and Beant died.

 

[oc_in_fw]

1941- though we were not officially in the war yet, the USS Reuben James is sunk by a German U boat.

USS Reuben James (DD-245) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[MVeeI]

November 1

Barry Sadler, co-writer and singer of The Ballad of the Green Berets, was born in 1940.

Actress Jenny McCarthy was born in 1972.

The first H-bomb was detonated on the Enewatek Atoll in 1952. It had the explosive power of 10 megatons of TNT.

 

[Mr. Scruffy]

November 1

1512 - The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, one of Italian artist Michelangelo’s finest works, was exhibited to the public for the first time. The opening coincided with All Saints’ Day, the solemn holy day of the Roman Catholic Church that is dedicated to the saints of the Church – that is, all those who have attained heaven.

1765 - In the face of widespread opposition in the American colonies, Parliament enacts the Stamp Act, a taxation measure designed to raise revenue for British military operations in America. The Act, was a direct tax on the colonists and led to an uproar in America over an issue that was to be a major cause of the Revolution: taxation without representation.

1814 - The Congress of Vienna opens to re-draw the European political map after the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars. It was the first of a series of international meetings that came to be known as the Concert of Europe, which was an attempt to forge a peaceful balance of power in Europe. It served as a model for later organizations such as the League of Nations in 1919 and the United Nations in 1945.

 

[MVeeI]

November 2

1948 - Harry Truman defeats Thomas E. Dewey's in the presidential election.

1889 - North Dakota and South Dakota become the 39th and 40th states, respectively.

1963 - Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, is killed by the South Vietnamese Army.

 

[MVeeI]

November 2, 1960

A British jury finds D. H. Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterly's Lover, is not obscene. The book inspired Mick Jagger to write Lady Jane.

 

[MVeeI]

November 3

Presidents elected

• John Adams (1796)
• Ulysses S. Grant (1868)
• William McKinley (1896)
• William Howard Taft (1908)
• Franklin D. Roosevelt (1936, 2nd term)
• Lyndon B. Johnson (1964)

1911 - The Chevrolet is introduced to compete with the Ford Model T.

1957 - The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 with Laika, a dog, on board.