1390 – First trial for witchcraft in Paris leading to the death of three people.
1618 – English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded for allegedly conspiring against James I of England.
1675 – Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz makes the first use of the long s as a symbol of the integral in calculus.
1863 – Eighteen countries meet in Geneva and agree to form the International Red Cross.
1901 – In Amherst, Massachusetts, nurse Jane Toppan is arrested for murdering the Davis family of Boston with an overdose of morphine.
1918 – The German High Seas Fleet is incapacitated when sailors mutiny and trigger the German Revolution of 1918-19.
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.
1942 – In the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures hold a public meeting to register outrage over Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews.
1961 – Syria exits from the United Arab Republic.
1964 – A collection of irreplaceable gems, including the 565 carat Star of India, is stolen by a group of thieves from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The thieves were arrested two days later, but the gems were not recovered until January, 1965.
1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
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Asteroid 951 Gaspra, named for the Crimean town on the Black Sea
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1991 – The American Galileo spacecraft makes its closest approach to 951 Gaspra, becoming the first probe to visit an asteroid.
2012 – Hurricane Sandy hits the east coast of the United States.
2015 – China announces the end of One-child policy after 35 years.
Births
1920 – Baruj Benacerraf, Venezuelan-American physician and immunologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2011)
1971 – Daniel J. Bernstein, American mathematician, cryptologist, and academic
Deaths
1911 – Joseph Pulitzer, Hungarian-American publisher, lawyer, and politician, founded Pulitzer, Inc. (b. 1847)
1969 – Pops Foster, American bassist and trumpet player (b. 1892)