1780 - Royalton, Vermont and Tunbridge, Vermont are the last major raids of the American Revolutionary War.
1781 - George Washington captures Yorktown, Virginia after the Siege of Yorktown.
1793 - Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI, is guillotined at the height of the French Revolution.
1793 - The Battle of Wattignies ends in a French victory.
1813 - The Sixth Coalition attacks Napoleon Bonaparte in the Battle of Leipzig.
1834 - Much of the ancient structure of the Palace of Westminster in London is burnt to the ground.
1841 - Queen's University is founded in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
1843 - Sir William Rowan Hamilton comes up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers.
1859 - John Brown leads a raid on Harper's Ferry, West 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.
1906 - The Captain of Köpenick fools the city hall of Köpenick and several soldiers by impersonating a Prussian officer.
1916 - Margaret Sanger founds Planned Parenthood by opening the first U.S. birth control clinic.
1923 - The Walt Disney Company is founded by Walt Disney and his brother, Roy Disney.
1934 - Chinese Communists begin the Long March; it ended a year and four days later, by which time Mao Zedong had regained his title as party chairman.
1939 - World War II: First attack on British territory by the German Luftwaffe.
1940 - Benjamin O. Davis Sr. is named the first African American general in the United States Army.
1940 - Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto is established.
1945 - The Food and Agriculture Organization was founded in Quebec City, Canada.
1946 - Nuremberg Trials: Execution of the convicted Nazi leaders of the Main Trial.
1949 - Nikolaos Zachariadis, leader of the Communist Party of Greece, announces a "temporary cease-fire", effectively ending the Greek Civil War.
1949 - The diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic are established.
1951 - The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, is assassinated in Rawalpindi.
1962 - Cuban Missile Crisis between the United States and Cuba begins.
1964 - The People's Republic of China detonates its first nuclear weapon; Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin are inaugurated as General Secretary of the CPSU and Premier, respectively.
1968 - United States athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos are kicked off of the USA's team for performing a Black Power salute during a medal ceremony.
1968 - Kingston, Jamaica is rocked by the Rodney Riots, inspired by the barring of Walter Rodney from the country.
1970 - In response to the October Crisis terrorist kidnapping, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada invokes the War Measures Act.
1973 - Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1975 - The Balibo Five, a group of Australian television journalists based in the town of Balibo in the then Portuguese Timor (now East Timor), are killed by Indonesian troops.
1984 - Desmond Tutu is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1987 - Great Storm of 1987: A hurricane force winds hit much of the South of England killing 23 people.
1991 - Luby's massacre: George Hennard runs amok in Killeen, Texas, killing 23 and wounding 20 in Luby's Cafeteria.
1991 - Jharkhand Chhatra Yuva Morcha is founded at a conference in Ranchi, India.
1993 - Anti-Nazi riot breaks out in Welling in Kent, after police stop protesters approaching the British National Party headquarters.
1995 - The Million Man March occurs in Washington, D.C.
1996 - Eighty-four people are killed and more than 180 injured as 47,000 football fans attempt to squeeze into the 36,000-seat Estadio Mateo Flores in Guatemala City.
1998 - Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London on a warrant from Spain requesting his extradition on murder charges.
2002 - Bibliotheca Alexandrina in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, a commemoration of the Library of Alexandria that was lost in antiquity, is officially inaugurated.
