Sunday, October 15

1815 – French Emperor Napoleon I is exiled to Saint Helena

1888 – Police in the Whitechapel district of London receive the “From Hell” letter, supposedly sent by Jack the Ripper

1956 – Fortran, the first modern computer language, is released

Monday, October 16

1793 – Marie Antoinette, the Austrian Queen of France, is guillotined during the French Revolution

1847 – Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, is published

1940 – The Warsaw Ghetto is established by Nazi German authorities

1950 – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis is published

Tuesday, October 17

1777 – John Burgoyne surrenders his army of 6,000 British troops to Continental General Benedict Arnold at Saratoga, marking this as one of the greatest American victories of the Revolution

1781 – British General Charles Cornwallis surrenders after the Siege of Yorktown, essentially ending the American Revolution

1888 – Thomas Edison files a patent for the Optical Phonograph, the first movie projector

Wednesday, October 18

1775 – African-American poet Phyllis Wheatley is freed from slavery

1851 – Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is first published as The Whale

1867 – The United States purchases Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million

1898 – The United States takes Puerto Rico from Spain

Thursday, October 19

1933 – Germany leaves the League of Nations

1943 – Streptomycin, the first antibiotic cure for tuberculosis, is isolated by researchers at Rutgers University

1973 – President Richard Nixon rejects an Appeals Court decision that he turn in the Watergate tapes

Friday, October 20

1740 – Maria Theresa takes the Austrian throne, beginning the war of Austrian Succession

1803 – The United States Senate ratifies the Louisiana Purchase under President Thomas Jefferson

1961 – The Soviet Union performs the first armed test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile

Saturday, October 21

1774 – Colonists raise the first flag to use the word “liberty” in defiance of British rule in Colonial America rule

1797 – The USS Constitution is launched in Boston Harbor

1854 – Florence Nightingale and 38 nurses are sent to the Crimean War

1945 – Women in France gain the right to vote