October 14 - Events

Events

• 222 – Pope Callixtus I is killed by a mob in Rome's Trastevere after a 5-year reign in which he had stabilized the Saturday fast three times per year, with no food, oil, or wine to be consumed on those days. Callixtus is succeeded by cardinal Urban I.
• 1066 – Norman Conquest: Battle of Hastings – In England on Senlac Hill, seven miles from Hastings, the Norman forces of William the Conqueror defeat the English army and kill King Harold II of England.
• 1322 – Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeats King Edward II of England at Byland, forcing Edward to accept Scotland's independence.
• 1465 – Wallachian voivode Radu cel Frumos, younger brother of Vlad Ţepeş, issues a writ from his residence in Bucharest
• 1582 – Because of the implementation of the Gregorian calendar this day does not exist in this year in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
• 1586 – Mary, Queen of Scots, goes on trial for conspiracy against Elizabeth I of England.
• 1656 – Massachusetts enacts the first punitive legislation against the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The marriage of church-and-state in Puritanism makes them regard the Quakers as spiritually apostate and politically subversive.
• 1758 – Seven Years' War: Austria defeats Prussia at the Battle of Hochkirk.
• 1773 – The first recorded Ministry of Education, the Komisja Edukacji Narodowej (Polish for Commission of National Education), is formed in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
• 1773 – Just before the beginning of the American Revolutionary War, several of the British East India Company's tea ships are set ablaze at the old seaport of Annapolis, Maryland.
• 1805 – Battle of Elchingen, France defeats Austria.
• 1806 – Battle of Jena-Auerstädt France defeats Prussia.
• 1808 – The Republic of Ragusa is annexed by France.
• 1812 – Work on London's Regent's Canal starts.
• 1840 – The Maronite leader Bashir II surrenders to the British Army and then is sent into exile on the islands of Malta.
• 1843 – The British arrest the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell for conspiracy to commit crimes.
• 1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Bristoe Station – Confederate troops under the command of General Robert E. Lee fail to drive the American Union Army completely out of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
• 1882 – University of the Punjab is founded in a part of India that later became West Pakistan.
• 1884 – The American inventor, George Eastman, receives a U.S. Government patent on his new paper-strip photographic film.
• 1888 – Louis Le Prince films first motion picture: Roundhay Garden Scene.
• 1898 – The steamer ship SS Mohegan sinks after impacting the Manacles near Cornwall, United Kingdom, killing 106.
• 1908 – The Chicago Cubs defeat the Detroit Tigers, 2-0, clinching the World Series. It would be their last one to date.
• 1910 – The English aviator Claude Grahame-White lands his Farman Aircraft biplane on Executive Avenue near the White House in Washington, D.C..
• 1912 – While campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the former President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, is shot and mildly wounded by John Schrank, a mentally-disturbed saloon keeper. With the fresh wound in his chest, and the bullet still within it, Mr. Roosevelt still carries out his scheduled public speech.
• 1913 – Senghenydd Colliery Disaster, the United Kingdom's worst coal mining accident, occurs, and it claims the lives of 439 miners.
• 1920 – Part of Petsamo Province is ceded by the Soviet Union to Finland.
• 1925 – An Anti-French uprising in French-occupied Damascus, Syria. (All French inhabitants flee the city.)
• 1926 – The children's book Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne, is first published.
• 1933 – Nazi Germany withdraws from The League of Nations.
• 1938 – The first flight of the Curtiss Aircraft Company's P-40 Warhawk fighter plane.
• 1939 – The German submarine U-47 sinks the British battleship HMS Royal Oak within her harbour at Scapa Flow, Scotland.
• 1940 – Balham subway station disaster in London, England, occurs during the Nazi Luftwaffe air raids on Great Britain.
• 1943 – Prisoners at the Nazi German Sobibor extermination camp in Poland revolt against the Germans, killing eleven SS guards, and wounding many more. About 300 of the Sobibor Camp's 600 prisoners escape, and about 50 of these survive the end of the war.
• 1943 – The American Eighth Air Force loses 60 B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers in aerial combat during the second mass-daylight air raid on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing factories in western Nazi Germany.
• 1943 – José P. Laurel takes the oath of office as President of the Philippines (Second Philippine Republic).
• 1944 – Athens, Greece, is liberated by British Army troops entering the city as the Wehrmacht pulls out during World War II. This clears the way for the Greek government-in-exile to return to its historic capital city, with George Papandreou, Sr., as the head-of-government.
• 1947 – Captain Chuck Yeager of the U.S. Air Force flies a Bell X-1 rocket-powered experimental aircraft, the Glamorous Glennis, faster than the speed of sound - over the high desert of Southern California - and becomes the first pilot and the first airplane to do so in level flight.
• 1949 – Eleven leaders of the American Communist Party are convicted, after a nine-month trial in a Federal District Court, of conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Federal Government.
• 1949 – Chinese Civil War: Chinese Communist forces occupy the city of Guangzhou (Canton), in Guangdong, China.
• 1952 – Korean War: United Nations and South Korean forces launch Operation Showdown against Chinese strongholds at the Iron Triangle. The resulting Battle of Triangle Hill is the biggest and bloodiest battle of 1952.
• 1956 – Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the Indian Untouchable caste leader, converts to Buddhism along with 385,000 of his followers (see Neo-Buddhism).
• 1957 – Queen Elizabeth II becomes the first Canadian Monarch to open up an annual session of the Canadian Parliament, presenting her Speech from the Throne in Ottawa, Canada.
• 1958 – The American Atomic Energy Commission, with supporting military units, carries out an underground nuclear weapon test at the Nevada Test Site, just north of Las Vegas, Nevada.
• 1958 – The District of Columbia's Bar Association votes to accept African-Americans as member attorneys.
• 1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis begins: A U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane and its pilot fly over the island of Cuba and take photographs of Soviet missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads being installed and erected in Cuba.
• 1964 – Leonid Brezhnev becomes the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and thereby, along with his allies - such as Alexei Kosygin - the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), ousting the former monolithic leader Nikita Khrushchev, and sending him into retirement as a nonperson in the USSR.
• 1966 – The city of Montreal, Quebec, begins the operation of its underground Montreal Metro rapid-transit system.
• 1967 – The Vietnam War: The folk singer Joan Baez is arrested concerning a physical blockade of the U.S. Army's induction center in Oakland, California.
• 1968 – Vietnam War: 27 soldiers are arrested at the Presidio of San Francisco in California for their peaceful protest of stockade conditions and the Vietnam War.
• 1968 – Vietnam War: The United States Department of Defense announces that the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps will send about 24,000 soldiers and Marines back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours of duty in the combat zone there.
• 1968 – The first live telecast from a manned spacecraft, the Apollo 7, launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the U.S.A.
• 1968 – An earthquake rated at 6.8 on the Richter Scale destroys the Australian town of Meckering, Western Australia, and it also ruptures all nearby main highways and railroads.
• 1968 – Jim Hines of the United States of America becomes the first man ever to break the so-called "ten-second barrier" in the 100-meter sprint in the Summer Olympic Games held in Mexico City with a time of 9.95 seconds.
• 1969 – The United Kingdom introduces the British fifty-pence coin, which replaces, over the following years, the British ten-shilling note, in anticipation of the decimalization of the British currency in 1971, and the abolition of the shilling as a unit of currency anywhere in the world.
• 1973 – In the Thammasat student uprising over 100,000 people protest in Thailand against the Thanom military government; 77 are killed and 857 are injured by soldiers.
• 1979 – The first Gay Rights March on Washington, D.C., the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, demands "an end to all social, economic, judicial, and legal oppression of lesbian and gay people", and draws 200,000 people.
• 1981 – Citing official misconduct in the investigation and trial, Amnesty International charges the U.S. Federal Government with holding Richard Marshall of the American Indian Movement as a political prisoner.
• 1981 – Vice President Hosni Mubarak is elected as the President of Egypt one week after the assassination of the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat.
• 1982 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan proclaims a War on Drugs.
• 1983 – Maurice Bishop, Prime Minister of Grenada, is overthrown and later executed in a military coup d'état led by Bernard Coard.
• 1994 – The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, The Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Foreign Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their role in the establishment of the Oslo Accords and the framing of the future Palestinian Self Government.
• 1998 – Eric Robert Rudolph is charged with six bombings including the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, Georgia.
• 2003 – Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman becomes infamously known as the scapegoat for the Cubs losing game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series to the Florida Marlins. This has become known as the Steve Bartman incident.
• 2006 – The college football brawl between University of Miami and Florida International University leads to suspensions of 31 players of both teams.
• 2012 – Felix Baumgartner jumps from the stratosphere to try to break the record of the highest freefall jump, at an altitude of 39,068 meters (128,18 ft)