U.S. Navy fighter jets intercept Italian cruise ship hijackers

The United States Naval Academy opens in Annapolis, Maryland, with 50 midshipmen students and seven professors. Known as the Naval School until 1850, the curriculum included mathematics and navigation, gunnery and steam, chemistry, English, natural philosophy, and French. The Naval School officially became the U.S. Naval Academy in 1850, and a new curriculum went into […]

On October 10, 1935, George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess premieres on Broadway. Porgy and Bess began its journey to the Broadway stage in 1926, when George Gershwin wrote a letter late one night to the author of a book he was reading proposing that the two of them collaborate on an operatic adaptation. The […]

On October 10, 1954, the Viet Minh formally take over Hanoi and control of North Vietnam. The Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh (Vietnam Independence League), or Viet Minh as it would become known to the world, was a Communist front organization founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941 to organize resistance against French colonial rule […]

Less than a year before Richard M. Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States, his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigns in disgrace. The same day, he pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption. He was subsequently fined $10,000, sentenced to […]

Former U.S. postal worker Joseph Harris shoots two former co-workers to death at the post office in Ridgewood, New Jersey. The night before, Harris had killed his former supervisor, Carol Ott, with a three-foot samurai sword, and shot her fiance, Cornelius Kasten, in their home. After a four-hour standoff with police at the post office, […]

On October 10, 2014, activist Malala Yousafzai, age 17, wins the Nobel Peace Prize. A fierce advocate for girls’ education, in her native Pakistan and around the world, she is the youngest-ever Nobel laureate. Malala Yousafzai was in chemistry class when she learned she had won the Nobel Peace Prize. After hearing the news, she […]