Event-a-Day

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320 – Pappus of Alexandria, Greek philosopher, observes an eclipse of the Sun and writes a commentary on The Great Astronomer (Almagest).

1565 – Ships belonging to the Matsura clan of Japan fail to capture the Portuguese trading carrack in the Battle of Fukuda Bay, the first recorded naval battle between Japan and the West.

1851 – Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale by Richard Bentley of London.

1867 – United States takes possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for $7.2 million. Celebrated annually in the state as Alaska Day.

1898 – The United States takes possession of Puerto Rico from Spain.

1944 – World War II: Soviet Union begins the liberation of Czechoslovakia from Nazi Germany. The state funeral of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel takes place in Ulm Germany.

1954 – Texas Instruments announces the first transistor radio.

1967 – The Soviet probe Venera 4 reaches Venus and becomes the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet.

202 BC – Second Punic War: At the Battle of Zama, Roman legions under Scipio Africanus defeat Hannibal Barca, leader of the army defending Carthage.

1216 – King John of England dies at Newark-on-Trent and is succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Henry III.

1469 – Ferdinand II of Aragon marries Isabella I of Castile, a marriage that paves the way to the unification of Aragon and Castile into a single country, Spain.

1512 – Martin Luther becomes a doctor of theology (Doctor in Biblia).

1649 – New Ross town, County Wexford, Ireland, surrenders to Oliver Cromwell.

1781 – At Yorktown, Virginia, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis' sword and formally surrendered to George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau.

1789 – Chief Justice John Jay is sworn in as the first Chief Justice of the United States.

1805 – Napoleonic Wars: Austrian General Mack surrenders his army to the Grande Armée of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Ulm. 30,000 prisoners are captured and 10,000 casualties inflicted on the losers.

1812 – Napoleon retreats from Moscow.

1813 – The Battle of Leipzig concludes, giving Napoleon one of his worst defeats.

1914 – The First Battle of Ypres begins.

1933 – Germany withdraws from the League of Nations.

1935 – The League of Nations places economic sanctions on fascist Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia.

1943 – The cargo vessel Sinfra is attacked by Allied aircraft at Souda Bay, Crete, and sunk. 2,098 Italian prisoners of war drown with it. Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, is isolated by researchers at Rutgers University.

1944 – United States forces land in the Philippines.

1973 – President Richard Nixon rejects an Appeals Court decision that he turn over the Watergate tapes.

2005 – Saddam Hussein goes on trial in Baghdad for crimes against humanity.

1720 – Caribbean pirate Calico Jack is captured by the Royal Navy.

1740 – Maria Theresa takes the throne of Austria. France, Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony refuse to honor the Pragmatic Sanction and the War of the Austrian Succession begins.

1803 – The United States Senate ratifies the Louisiana Purchase.

1805 – General Mack's army surrenders to Napoleon at Ulm after a few skirmishes.

1818 – The Convention of 1818 is signed between the United States and the United Kingdom, which settles the Canada–United States border on the 49th parallel for most of its length.

1827 – In the Battle of Navarino, a combined Turkish and Egyptian fleet is defeated by British, French, and Russian naval forces in the last significant battle fought with wooden sailing ships.

1910 – The hull of the RMS Olympic, sister-ship to the ill-fated RMS Titanic, is launched from the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

1941 – World War II: Thousands of civilians in Kragujevac in German-occupied Serbia are murdered in the Kragujevac massacre.

1944 – American general Douglas MacArthur fulfills his promise to return to the Philippines when he commands an Allied assault on the islands, reclaiming them from the Japanese during the Second World War.

1947 – The House Un-American Activities Committee begins its investigation into Communist infiltration of Hollywood, resulting in a blacklist that prevents some from working in the industry for years. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan establish diplomatic relations for the first time.

1968 – Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy marries Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

1973 – "Saturday Night Massacre": United States President Richard Nixon fires U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus after they refuse to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who is finally fired by Robert Bork. The Sydney Opera House is opened by Elizabeth II after 14 years of construction work.

1520 – Ferdinand Magellan discovers a strait now known as Strait of Magellan.

1774 – First display of the word "Liberty" on a flag, raised by colonists in Taunton, Massachusetts in defiance of British rule in Colonial America.

1797 – In Boston Harbor, the 44-gun United States Navy frigate USS Constitution is launched.

1805 – Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Trafalgar: A British fleet led by Vice Admiral Lord Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet under Admiral Villeneuve. The Franco-Spanish fleet lost twenty-two ships, without a single British vessel being lost. It was the most decisive naval battle of the war, ending French plans to invade England. However, Nelson dies during the battle.

1879 – Thomas Edison invents the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb.

1921 – President Warren G. Harding delivers the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.

1940 – The first edition of the Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is published.

1943 – The Provisional Government of Free India is formally declared by Subhas Chandra Bose.

1944 – World War II: The first kamikaze attack. A Japanese fighter plane carrying a 200-kilogram (440 lb) bomb attacks HMAS Australia off Leyte Island, as the Battle of Leyte Gulf began. Nemmersdorf massacre against the German civilians takes place. Battle of Aachen: The city of Aachen falls to American forces after three weeks of fighting, making it the first German city to fall to the Allies.

1945 – Women's suffrage: Women are allowed to vote in France for the first time.

1959 – In New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens to the public. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order transferring Wernher von Braun and other German scientists from the United States Army to NASA.

1965 – Comet Ikea–Seki approaches perihelion, passing 450,000 kilometers (279,617 miles) from the sun.

1967 – Vietnam War: More than 100,000 war protesters gather in Washington, D.C.. Similar demonstrations occur simultaneously in Japan and Western Europe.

2005 – Images of the dwarf planet Eris are taken and subsequently used in documenting its discovery by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz.

1746 – The College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University) receives its charter.

1777 – American Revolutionary War: American defenders of Fort Mercer on the Delaware River repulse repeated Hessian attacks in the Battle of Red Bank.

1784 – Russia founds a colony on Kodiak Island, Alaska.

1797 – André-Jacques Garnering makes the first recorded parachute jump from one thousand meters (3,200 feet) above Paris.

1878 – The first rugby match under floodlights takes place in Salford, between Broughton and Swinton.

1879 – Using a filament of carbonized thread, Thomas Edison tests the first practical electric incandescent light bulb (it lasted 13½ hours before burning out).

1883 – The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City opens with a performance of Gounod's Faust.

1927 – Nikola Tesla introduces six new inventions including single-phase electric power.

1957 – Vietnam War: First United States casualties in Vietnam.

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: US President John F. Kennedy, after internal counsel from Dwight D. Eisenhower, announces that American reconnaissance planes have discovered Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, and that he has ordered a naval "quarantine" of the Communist nation.

1966 – The Supremes become the first all-female music group to attain a No. 1 selling album (The Supremes A' Go-Go). The Soviet Union launches Luna 12.

1968 – Apollo program: Apollo 7 safely splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean after orbiting the Earth 163 times.

1975 – The Soviet unmanned space mission Venera 9 lands on Venus.

2006 – A Panama Canal expansion proposal is approved by 77.8% of voters in a National referendum held in Panama.

2008 – India launches its first unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-1.

1642 – Battle of Edgehill: First major battle of the First English Civil War.

1707 – The first Parliament of Great Britain meets.

1812 – Claude François de Malet, a French general, begins a conspiracy to overthrow Napoleon Bonaparte, claiming that the Emperor died in Russia and that he is now the commandant of Paris.

1850 – The first National Women's Rights Convention begins in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States.

1861 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus in Washington, D.C., for all military-related cases.

1911 – First use of aircraft in war: Italo-Turkish War: An Italian pilot takes off from Libya to observe Turkish army lines.

1915 – Women's suffrage: In New York City, 25,000–33,000 women march on Fifth Avenue to advocate their right to vote.

1929 – Great Depression: After a steady decline in stock market prices since a peak in September, the New York Stock Exchange begins to show signs of panic.

1944 – World War II: Battle of Leyte Gulf: The largest naval battle in history begins in the Philippines.

1956 – Thousands of Hungarians protest against the government and Soviet occupation. (The Hungarian Revolution is crushed on November 4).

1973 – The Watergate scandal: US President Richard M. Nixon agrees to turn over subpoenaed audio tapes of his Oval Office conversations.

1812 – Napoleonic Wars: The Battle of Maloyaroslavets takes place near Moscow.

1851 – William Lassell discovers the moons Umbriel, and Ariel, orbiting Uranus.

1857 – Sheffield F.C., the world's oldest association football club still in operation, is founded in Sheffield, England.

1861 – The first transcontinental telegraph line across the United States is completed, spelling the end for the 18-month-old Pony Express.

1901 – Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

1911 – Orville Wright remains in the air nine minutes and 45 seconds in a Wright Glider at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

1917 – Bolshevik Red Guards began takeover of buildings in Russia, among the first events associated with the October Revolution.

1926 – Harry Houdini's last performance takes place at the Garrick Theatre in Detroit.

1929 – "Black Thursday" stock market crash on the New York Stock Exchange.

1931 – The George Washington Bridge opens to public traffic.

1944 – World War II: The Japanese aircraft carrier Zuikaku and the Japanese battleship Musashi are sunk by American aircraft in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

1945 – Founding of the United Nations.

1946 – A camera on board the V-2 No. 13 rocket takes the first photograph of earth from outer space.

1947 – Famed animator Walt Disney testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming Disney
employees he believes to be communists.

1949 – The cornerstone of the United Nations Headquarters is laid.

1954 – Dwight D. Eisenhower pledges United States support to South Vietnam.

1957 – The United States Air Force starts the X-20 Dyna-Soar program.

1992 – The Toronto Blue Jays become the first Major League Baseball team based outside the United States to win the World Series.

1998 – Launch of Deep Space 1 comet/asteroid mission.

2007 – Chang'e 1, the first satellite in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, is launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

2008 – "Bloody Friday" saw many of the world's stock exchanges experience the worst declines in their history, with drops of around 10% in most indices.

2014 – The China National Space Administration launches an experimental lunar mission, Chang'e 5-T1, which will loop behind the Moon and return to Earth.

1415 – Hundred Years' War: Henry V of England and his lightly armored infantry and archers defeat the heavily armored French cavalry in the Battle of Agincourt on Saint Crispin's Day.

1747 – British fleet under Admiral Sir Edward Hawke defeats the French at the Second Battle of Cape Finisterre.

1760 – George III becomes King of Great Britain.

1812 – War of 1812: The American frigate, USS United States, commanded by Stephen Decatur, captures the British frigate HMS Macedonian.

1822 – Greek War of Independence: The First Siege of Missolonghi begins.

1854 – The Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War (Charge of the Light Brigade).

1944 – World War II: Battle of Leyte Gulf: The largest naval battle in history, takes place in and around the Philippines between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the U.S. Third and U.S. Seventh Fleets. Afterward is the first Kamikaze attack of the war.

1945 – The Republic of China takes over administration of Taiwan following Japan's surrender to the Allies.

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Adlai Stevenson shows photos at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council proving that Soviet missiles are installed in Cuba.

1977 – Digital Equipment Corporation releases OpenVMS V1.0.

1640 – The Treaty of Ripon is signed, restoring peace between Scotland and Charles I of England.

1774 – The first Continental Congress adjourns in Philadelphia.

1775 – King George III of Great Britain goes before Parliament to declare the American colonies in rebellion, and authorized a military response to quell the American Revolution.

1776 – Benjamin Franklin departs from America for France on a mission to seek French support for the American Revolution.

1861 – The Pony Express officially ceases operations.

1863 – The Football Association, the oldest football association in the world, is formed in London.

1881 – The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral takes place at Tombstone, Arizona.

1905 – Sweden accepted the independence of Norway.

1921 – The Chicago Theatre opens.

1936 – The first electric generator at Hoover Dam goes into full operation.

1940 – The P-51 Mustang makes its maiden flight.

1942 – World War II: In the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands during the Guadalcanal Campaign, one U.S. aircraft carrier, Hornet, is sunk and another aircraft carrier, Enterprise, is heavily damaged, while two Japanese carriers and one cruiser are heavily damaged.

1943 – World War II: First flight of the Dornier Do 335 "Pfeil".

1944 – World War II: The Battle of Leyte Gulf ends with an overwhelming American victory.

1968 – Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy pilots Soyuz 3 into space for a four-day mission.

1970 – Muhammad Ali faces off against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta, Georgia for the first time after Ali's three-year hiatus from evading to be drafted in the Vietnam War.

In fiction:

1985 - In Back to the Future, Marty McFly becomes the very first human being to travel back in time, travelling to 5 November 1955 with a time machine embedded in a DeLorean car. A week later, he travels back to 26 October 1985, then forward to 21 October 2015, back to 26 October 1985, further back to 12 November 1955, back again to 2 September 1885, then finally, forward to 27 October 1985 (whoa! I remembered all that )

Hello, Catlover!

And well done!

939 – Æthelstan, the first King of England, died and was succeeded by his half-brother, Edmund I.

1275 – Traditional founding of the city of Amsterdam.

1682 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is founded.

1795 – The United States and Spain sign the Treaty of Madrid, which establishes the boundaries between Spanish colonies and the U.S.

1806 – The French Army enters Berlin, following the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt.

1810 – United States annexes the former Spanish colony of West Florida.

1904 – The first underground New York City Subway line opens; the system becomes the biggest in United States, and one of the biggest in world.

1914 – The British lose their first battleship of World War I: The British super-dreadnought battleship HMS Audacious (23,400 tons) is sunk off Tory Island, north-west of Ireland, by a minefield laid by the armed German merchant-cruiser Berlin. The loss was kept an official secret in Britain until 14 November 1918 (three days after the end of the war). The sinking was witnessed and photographed by passengers on RMS Olympic, sister ship of RMS Titanic.

1936 – Mrs Wallis Simpson files for divorce which would eventually allow her to marry King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, thus forcing his abdication from the throne.

1954 – Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. becomes the first African-American general in the United States Air Force.

1961 – NASA tests the first Saturn I rocket in Mission Saturn-Apollo 1.

1962 – Major Rudolf Anderson of the United States Air Force becomes the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane is shot down in Cuba by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile.

1992 – United States Navy radioman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. is murdered by shipmate Terry M. Helvey for being gay, precipitating debate about gays in the military that resulted in the United States 'Don't ask, don't tell' military policy.

1420 – Beijing is officially designated the capital of the Ming dynasty on the same year that the Forbidden City, the seat of government, is completed.

1449 – Christian I is crowned king of Denmark.

1492 – Christopher Columbus discovered Cuba on his first voyage to the New World.

1636 – A vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony establishes the first college in what would become the United States, today known as Harvard University.

1664 – The Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot, later to be known as the Royal Marines, is established.

1919 – The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January.

1922 – Italian fascists led by Benito Mussolini march on Rome and take over the Italian government.

1929 – Black Monday, a day in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which also saw major stock market upheaval.

1940 – World War II: Greece rejects Italy's ultimatum. So, Greco-Italian War began. Italy invades Greece through Albania, marking Greece's entry into World War II.

1942 – The Alaska Highway (Alcan Highway) is completed through Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska.

1962 – End of Cuban Missile Crisis: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.

1964 – Vietnam War: U.S. officials deny any involvement in bombing North Vietnam.

1982 – The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party wins elections, leading to the first Socialist government in Spain after death of Franco; Felipe González becomes Prime Minister-elect. (Franco is still dead, by the way. )

2005 – Plame affair: Lewis Libby, Vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is indicted in the Valerie Plame case. Libby resigns later that day.

2009 – NASA successfully launches the Ares I-X mission, the only rocket launch for its later-cancelled Constellation program.

2013 – Five people are killed and 38 are injured after a car crashes into barriers just outside the Forbidden City in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China.

2014 – An unmanned Antares rocket carrying NASA's Cygnus CRS Orb-3 resupply mission to the International Space Station explodes seconds after taking off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia.

1618 – English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded for allegedly conspiring against James I of England.

1901 – Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of U.S. President William McKinley, is executed by electrocution.

1921 – The Harvard University football team loses to Centre College, ending a 25-game winning streak. This is considered one of the biggest upsets in college football.

1922 – King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy appoints Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister.

1923 – Turkey becomes a republic following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

1929 – The New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of '29 or "Black Tuesday", ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression.

1941 – The Holocaust: In the Kaunas Ghetto over 10,000 Jews are shot by German occupiers at the Ninth Fort, a massacre known as the "Great Action".

1942 – The Holocaust: In the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures hold a public meeting to register outrage over Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews.

1944 – The city of Breda in the Netherlands is liberated by 1st Polish Armoured Division. The Soviet Red Army enters Hungary.

1967 – Montreal's World Fair, Expo 67, closes with over 50 million visitors.

1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.

1991 – The American Galileo spacecraft makes its closest approach to 951 Gaspra, becoming the first probe to visit an asteroid.

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. ATSC HDTV broadcasting in the United States is inaugurated with the launch of STS-95 space shuttle mission.

2012 – Hurricane Sandy hits the east coast of the United States, killing 148 directly and 138 indirectly, while leaving nearly $70 billion in damages and causing major power outages.

2014 – San Francisco Giants win the 2014 World Series.

2015 – China announces the end of One Child Policy after 35 years.

1485 – King Henry VII of England is crowned.

1864 – Helena, Montana is founded after four prospectors discover gold at "Last Chance Gulch".

1905 – Czar Nicholas II of Russia issues the October Manifesto, granting the Russian peoples basic civil liberties and the right to form a duma.

1918 – The Ottoman Empire signs an armistice with the Allies, ending the First World War in the Middle East.

1938 – Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, causing real anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.

1941 – World War II: Franklin D. Roosevelt approves U.S. $1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the Allied nations.

1942 – Lt. Tony Fasson, Able Seaman Colin Grazier and canteen assistant Tommy Brown from HMS Petard board U-559, retrieving material which would lead to the decryption of the German Enigma code.

1944 – Anne and Margot Frank are deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they die from disease the following year, shortly before the end of WWII.

1945 – Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs signs a contract for the Brooklyn Dodgers to break the baseball color line.

1953 – Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document National Security Council Paper No. 162/2, which states that the United States' arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat.

1960 – Michael Woodruff performs the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

1961 – Nuclear testing: The Soviet Union detonates the hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya; at 50 megatons of yield, it remains the largest explosive device ever detonated, nuclear or otherwise.

1974 – The Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman takes place in Kinshasa, Zaire. Ali wins by KO in the eighth round, regaining the title of World Heavyweight Champion and causing Foreman's first professional defeat.

1985 – Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off for mission STS-61-A, its final successful mission.

1517 – Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther posts his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

1864 – Nevada is admitted as the 36th U.S. state.

1917 – World War I: Battle of Beersheba: The "last successful cavalry charge in history".

1918 – World War I: Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

1922 – Benito Mussolini is made Prime Minister of Italy.

1938 – Great Depression: In an effort to restore investor confidence, the New York Stock Exchange unveils a fifteen-point program aimed to upgrade protection for the investing public.

1940 – World War II: The Battle of Britain ends: The United Kingdom prevents a possible German invasion.

1941 – After 14 years of work, Mount Rushmore is completed. The destroyer USS Reuben James is torpedoed by a German U-boat near Iceland, killing more than 100 U.S. Navy sailors. It is the first U.S. Navy vessel sunk by enemy action in WWII.

1943 – World War II: An F4U Corsair accomplishes the first successful radar-guided interception by a United States Navy or Marine Corps aircraft.

1956 – Suez Crisis: The United Kingdom and France begin bombing Egypt to force the reopening of the Suez Canal.

1961 – In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin's body is removed from Vladimir Lenin's Tomb.

2000 – Soyuz TM-31 launches, carrying the first resident crew to the International Space Station. The ISS has been crewed continuously since then.

2011 – The global population of humans reaches seven billion. This day is now recognized by the United Nations as Seven Billion Day.