Oct. 9
1910: A coal dust explosion at the Starkville Mine in Colorado killed 56 miners.
1962: Uganda won independence from British rule.
1967: Marxist guerrilla leader Che Guevara, 39, was executed by the Bolivian army a day after his capture.
Oct. 10
1845: The U.S. Naval Academy was established in Annapolis, Maryland.
1911: Chinese revolutionaries launched an uprising that led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China.
1935: George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, featuring an all-Black cast, opened on Broadway.
1966: The Beach Boys’ single “Good Vibrations” was released by Capitol Records.
1973: Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to income tax evasion amid bribery accusations.
Oct. 11
1906: The San Francisco Board of Education ordered Asian students segregated into their own school. The order was rescinded after President Theodore Roosevelt intervened and agreed to limit Japanese immigration.
1984: Challenger astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space.
1991: Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Oct. 12
1492: Christopher Columbus’s first expedition made landfall on what is now San Salvador Island in the Bahamas.
1870: General Robert E. Lee, former overall commander of the Confederate States Army in the Civil War, died in Lexington, Virginia, at age 63.
1984: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped an attempt on her life when an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at a hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people.
Oct. 13
1792: The cornerstone of the executive mansion, later known as the White House, was laid by President George Washington.
1943: Italy declared war on Germany, its one-time Axis partner.
1972: A Uruguayan flight with 45 people crashed in the Andes; 16 survivors were rescued after more than two months, having endured by eating the dead.
2016: Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature.
Oct. 14
1066: Normans under William the Conqueror defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings.
1586: Mary, Queen of Scots, went on trial in England, accused of committing treason against Queen Elizabeth I. (Mary was beheaded in February 1587.)
1947: U.S. Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier.
1964: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize.
1964: In one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history, American Billy Mills, an Oglala Lakota, won the 10,000-meter race at the Tokyo Summer Games.
Oct. 15
1815: Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to the South Atlantic Island of St. Helena, where he spent the final 5 1/2 years of his life.
1954: Hurricane Hazel struck the Carolina coast as a Category 4 storm, killing about 1,000 in the Caribbean, 95 in the U.S. and 81 in Canada.
2017: Actor and activist Alyssa Milano tweeted that women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted should write “Me too” as a status. Within hours, tens of thousands had taken up the #MeToo hashtag.
