On October 19th...

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1187 Pope Urban III died.

1466 The Second Peace of Thorn ended the Thirteen Years' War.

1469 Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were married.

1630 The first general court in New England convened in Boston.

1745 Author Jonathan Swift died.

1748 Martha Wayles Skelton, wife of President Thomas Jefferson, was born.

1765 The Stamp Act Congress met in New York City.

1781 British General Lord Cornwallis surrendered his army to a combined Franco-American army at Yorktown, Virginia.

1863 The Battle of Buckland Mills was fought.

1864 Confederate troops skirmished with Kansas militia forces at Lexington, Missouri.
1864 About 25 Confederate troops attacked St. Albans, Vermont.
1864 The Battle of Cedar Creek was fought.

1872 The world's largest gold nugget (215 kg) was found in New South Wales, Australia.

1879 Thomas Edison began the first successful demonstration of his electric light.

1897 Inventor and businessman George Pullman died.

1901 Alberto Santos-Dumont flew a dirigible around the Eiffel Tower.
1901 Edward Elgar's "Pomp & Circumstance March" premiered in Liverpool, England.

1905 "Wild West" figure Virgil Earp died.

1906 Joseph Glidden, inventor of barbed wire, died.

1909 Actor Robert Beatty was born.

1914 The U.S. Post Office first used an automobile to collect and deliver mail.

1915 Russia and Italy declared war on Bulgaria.

1917 Love Field in Dallas, Texas, opened.

1922 Columnist Jack Anderson was born.

1926 John C. Garand patented the semi-automatic rifle.

1932 Actor Robert Reed was born.

1937 Physicist Ernest Rutherford died.

1943 Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, was isolated by researchers at Rutgers University.

1945 Actor Divine was born.
1945 Actor John Lithgow was born.

1949 Football player Lynn Dickey was born.

1951 U.S. President Harry Truman formally ended the state of war with Germany.

1958 The Brussels World's Fair closed.
1958 Former Nazi official Erich Koch went on trail for war crimes in Poland.

1960 Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in in Atlanta, Georgia.
1960 The United States imposed an embargo on exports to Cuba.

1962 Boxer Evander Holyfield was born.

1965 Television carpenter Ty Pennington was born.

1967 Amy Carter, daughter of President Jimmy Carter, was born.

1969 Professed psychic John Edward was born.

1971 The last issue of Look magazine was published.

1977 The Concorde landed in New York City for the first time.

1983 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day became an official federal holiday.

1994 Actress Martha Raye died.

2003 Mother Teresa was canonized by Pope John Paul II.

2008 Fashion critic Richard Sylvan Selzer, aka Mr. Blackwell, died.

2010 Actor Tom Bosley died.

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This page was last updated on October 19, 2018.