539 BC – Cyrus the Great (founder of Persian Empire) entered the capital of Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to their land.
312 – Constantine the Great enters Rome after his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, stages a grand adventus in the city, and is met with popular jubilation. Maxentius’ body is fished out of the Tiber and beheaded.
1390 – First trial for witchcraft in Paris leading to the death of three people.
1675 – Leibniz makes the first use of the long s (∫) as a symbol of the integral in calculus.
1787 – Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni receives its first performance in Prague.
1901 – Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley, is executed by electrocution.
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.
1960 – In Louisville, Kentucky, Cassius Clay (who later takes the name Muhammad Ali) wins his first professional fight.
1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
1998 – Space Shuttle Discovery blasted off on STS-95 with 77-year-old John Glennon board, making him the oldest person to go into space, until of course, William Shatner made his recent trip.
1998 – While en route from Adana to Ankara, a Turkish Airlines flight with a crew of six and 33 passengers is hijacked by a Kurdish militant who orders the pilot to fly to Switzerland. The plane instead lands in Ankara after the pilot tricked the hijacker into thinking that he is landing in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia to refuel.
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.
2015 – China announces the end of One-child policy after 35 years.
2018 – Lion Air Flight 610 of a Boeing 737 MAX crashes after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia killing 189 people on board.
