Battle of King’s Mountain

A Confederate attempt to regain ground that had been lost around Richmond, Virginia, is thwarted when Union troops turn back General Robert E. Lee’s assault at Darbytown Road.  In the summer of 1864, the campaign between Lee and Union General Ulysses S. Grant ground to a halt at Petersburg, 25 miles south of Richmond. The […]

On October 7, 1916, Georgia Tech defeats Cumberland University, 222-0, in the most lopsided game in college football history. Coached by John Heisman, later namesake of college football’s most famous trophy, Georgia Tech takes a 63-0 lead in the first quarter at Grant Field in Atlanta. “All of Cumberland’s plays were smothered completely,” the Atlanta Constitution […]

On October 7, 1944, in a bold act of resistance, several hundred prisoners incarcerated in the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau stage the Sonderkommando revolt, destroying most of the gas chambers and crematoria where they were forced to work. While some of the inmates manage to kill a handful of Nazi officers and briefly escape […]

Poet Allen Ginsberg reads his poem “Howl” at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco. The poem was an immediate success that rocked the Beat literary world and set the tone for confessional poetry of the 1960s and later. Ginsberg was born in 1926 to a high school English teacher father and Marxist […]

In the second of four televised debates, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon turn their attention to foreign policy issues. Three Cold War episodes, in particular, engendered spirited confrontations between Kennedy and Nixon. The first involved Cuba, which had recently come under the control of Fidel Castro. Nixon argued that […]

On October 7, 1983, ‘Never Say Never Again’ opens in U.S. theaters, featuring Sean Connery in a reprise of his role as British secret service agent James Bond. The actor had last played Bond in 1971.

Four Palestinian terrorists board the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro shortly after it left Alexandria, Egypt, in order to hijack the luxury liner. The well-armed men, who belonged to the Popular Front for the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), the terrorist wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Abu Abbas, easily took control of the […]

On October 7, 2003, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is elected governor of California, the most populous state in the nation with the world’s fifth-largest economy. Despite his inexperience, Schwarzenegger came out on top in the 11-week campaign to replace Gray Davis, who had earlier become the first United States governor to be recalled by the people […]