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Guggenheim Museum opens in New York City

Born on This Day

Celia Cruz

1925 - 2003

Grammy-winning Cuban-American singer dubbed the “Queen of Salsa” who also appeared in the 1992 film The Mambo Kings.

Carrie Fisher

1956 - 2016

Actor best known for playing Princess Leia in the Star Wars film franchise. Daughter of Debbie Reynolds and crooner Eddie Fisher.

Doja Cat

1995 -

Pop rapper who leapt to fame in the 2020s with hits like “Say So” and “Paint the Town Red.”

Celia CruzWireImage

Carrie FisherGetty Images

Doja CatWireImage

1867

OCT21

The Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed. The talks, attended by more than 5,000 prominent chiefs and warriors, was one of the largest gatherings of Native American leaders for treaty negotiations in U.S. history.

Timeline

Also on This Day in History

Discover more of the major events, famous births, notable deaths and everything else history-making that happened on October 21st

USS Constitution launched

After two unsuccessful attempts, the USS Constitution is launched in Boston Harbor. The a 44-gun U.S. Navy frigate, built to fight Barbary pirates off the coast of Tripoli, performed commendably during those conflicts, and in 1805 a peace treaty with Tripoli was signed on the Constitution‘s deck. During the War of 1812, the Constitution won […]

Battle of Trafalgar

The Battle of Trafalgar, fought off the coast of Spain in 1805, was a pivotal moment in the Napoleonic wars that established England as a dominant naval power.

Battle of Ball’s Bluff

On October 21, 1861, Union troops suffer a devastating defeat in the second major engagement of the Civil War. The Battle of Ball’s Bluff in Virginia produced the war’s first martyr and led to the creation of a Congressional committee to monitor the conduct of the war. After the Battle of Bull Run, Virginia, on […]

Germans massacre men, women and children in Yugoslavia

Between October 18-October 21, 1941, German soldiers go on a rampage, killing thousands of Yugoslavian civilians, including whole classes of schoolboys, in what has become known as the Kragujevac massacre. Despite attempts to maintain neutrality at the outbreak of World War II, Yugoslavia finally succumbed to signing a “friendship treaty” with Germany in late 1940, […]

Aberfan disaster kills 144 people and levels a Welsh mining village

On October 21, 1966, the Aberfan disaster becomes one of the United Kingdom’s worst coal mining accidents. A landslide of coal waste crashes into a small Welsh mining town, killing 144 people.

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Thousands protest the war in Vietnam

In Washington, D.C. nearly 100,000 people gather to protest the American war effort in Vietnam. More than 50,000 of the protesters marched to the Pentagon to ask for an end to the conflict. The protest was the most dramatic sign of waning U.S. support for President Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Polls taken in the […]

Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins killed on set for the Western movie ‘Rust’

Her death on October 21, 2021, came after an accidental shooting on a Western film starring Alec Baldwin.

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