Great Chicago Fire begins

On October 8, 1871, the Peshtigo Fire, now considered the most devastating fire in United States history, burns in Wisconsin. Some 1,200 people lost their lives and 2 billion trees were consumed by flames. Despite the massive scale of the blaze, it was overshadowed by the Great Chicago Fire, which began later that night about […]

On Oct. 8, 1945, Raytheon Manufacturing Company filed a patent for what’s now a staple kitchen appliance in homes around the world: the microwave oven. The appliance, invented by Raytheon employee Percy Spencer, now sits in more than 90 percent of American homes. Spencer, who dropped out of grammar school at the age of 12 to […]

On Oct. 8, 1956, Don Larsen of the New York Yankees throws the only perfect game in World Series history. “I was so happy. I felt like crying,” he tells reporters after New York’s 2-0 win in Game 5 over the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Yankees go on to win the World Series in seven games. By […]

A Bolivian guerrilla force led by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara is defeated in a skirmish with a special detachment of the Bolivian army. Guevara was wounded, captured and executed the next day. Born in Argentina, Guevara believed that a man of action could revolutionize a people. He played a pivotal role in the Cuban Revolution […]

On October 8, 1970, one of Russia’s best-known contemporary writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. A leading writer and critic of Soviet internal oppression, he was awarded the prize, the Nobel committee wrote, “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” Born in 1918 in […]

On October 8, 2004, Kenyan environmental justice organizer Wangari Maathai receives a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace,” becoming the first African woman to win the award.  Maathai was born to peasant farmers in 1940, and grew up in a rural community in Kenya. She received her […]

On October 8, 2014, Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with a case of the Ebola Virus Disease in the U.S., dies at age 42 at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Shortly before his death, Duncan, who lived in Liberia, had traveled to America from West Africa, which was in the throes of […]