• 1147 - The Portuguese, under Afonso I, and Crusaders from England and Flanders conquer Lisbon after a four-month siege.
• 1147 - Seljuk Turks defeat German crusaders under Conrad III at the Battle of Dorylaeum.
• 1315 - Adam Banastre, Henry de Lea and William Bradshaw, led an attack on Liverpool Castle.
• 1415 - The army of Henry V of England defeats the French at the Battle of Agincourt.
• 1616 - Dutch sea-captain Dirk Hartog makes second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil, at the later-named Dirk Hartog Island off the Western Australian coast.
• 1747 - British fleet under Admiral Sir Edward Hawke defeats the French at the second battle of Cape Finisterre.
• 1760 - George III becomes King of Great Britain.
• 1813 - War of 1812: Canadians and Mohawks defeat the Americans in the Battle of Chateauguay.
• 1828 - The St Katharine Docks opened in London.
• 1854 - The Battle of Balaklava during the Crimean War (Charge of the Light Brigade).
• 1861 - The Toronto Stock Exchange was created.
• 1875 - The first performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is given in Boston, Massachusetts with Hans von Bülow as soloist.
• 1900 - The United Kingdom annexes the Transvaal.
• 1912 - Richard Strauss' opera Ariadne auf Naxos receives its debut performance at the Vienna State Opera.
• 1917 - Traditionally understood date of the October Revolution, involving the capture of the Winter Palace, Petrograd, Russia.
• 1924 - The forged Zinoviev Letter is published in the Daily Mail, wrecking the British Labour Party's hopes of re-election.
• 1935 - Hurricane floods Haiti, killing over 2,000 people.
• 1936 - Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini create the Rome-Berlin Axis.
• 1938 - The Archbishop of Dubuque, Francis J. L. Beckman, denounces Swing music as "a degenerated musical system... turned loose to gnaw away at the moral fiber of young people", warning that it leads down a "primrose path to hell".
• 1944 - Heinrich Himmler orders a crackdown on the Edelweiss Pirates, a loosely organized youth culture in Nazi Germany that had assisted army deserters and others to hide from the Third Reich.
• 1944 - The USS Tang (SS-306) under Richard O'Kane (the top submarine captain of World War II) is sunk by the ship's own torpedo.
• 1944 - The Romanian Army liberates Carei, the last Romanian city under Axis Powers' occupation.
• 1944 - Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history, takes place in and around the Philippines between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the U.S. Third and U.S. Seventh Fleets.
• 1945 - The Republic of China takes over administration of Taiwan following Japan's surrender to the Allies.
• 1962 - Cuban missile crisis: Adlai Stevenson shows photos at the UN proving Soviet missiles are installed in Cuba
• 1970 - The wreck of Confederate submarine Hunley was found off Charleston, South Carolina, by pioneer underwater archaeologist, Dr. E. Lee Spence, then just 22 years old. Hunley was the first submarine to sink a ship in warfare.
• 1971 - The United Nations seated the People's Republic of China and expelled the Republic of China (see political status of Taiwan and China and the United Nations)
• 1972 - The Washington Post reports that White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman was the fifth person to control a secret cash fund designed to finance illegal political sabotage and espionage during the 1972 presidential election campaign (see also Watergate scandal).
• 1977 - Digital Equipment Corporation releases OpenVMS V1.0.
• 1980 - Proceedings on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction conclude at The Hague.
• 1983 - Operation Urgent Fury: The United States and its Caribbean allies invade Grenada, six days after Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and several of his supporters were executed in a coup d'état.
• 1991 - History of Slovenia: Three months after the end of the Ten-Day War, the last soldier of the Yugoslav People's Army leaves the territory of the Republic of Slovenia.
• 1992 - Lithuania holds a referendum on its first post-Soviet constitution.
• 1993 - Jean Chrétien becomes Prime Minister of Canada with a massive majority for his Liberal Party in a general election in which the governing Progressive Conservatives, led by Kim Campbell, lost 149 of 151 seats in the parliament.
• 1995 - A commuter train slams into a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, killing seven students.
• 1996 - The "Days of Action", the largest one day strike in Ontario, Canada's history, as over 250,000 protesters converged on the Ontario Legislature and attempted to shut-down Toronto, in protest to the Mike Harris government's budget cuts.
• 1997 - After a brief civil war which has driven President Pascal Lissouba out of Brazzaville, Denis Sassou-Nguesso proclaims himself the President of the Republic of the Congo.
• 2004 - Fidel Castro, Cuba's President, announces that transactions using the American Dollar will be banned by November 8.
• 2007 - The first Airbus A380 passenger flight, operating for Singapore Airlines, with flight number SQ 380, flying scheduled service between Singapore and Sydney, Australia.

Births