539 BC – The army of Cyrus the Great of Persia takes Babylon.
633 – Battle of Hatfield Chase: King Edwin of Northumbria is defeated and killed by the British under Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon of Gwynedd.
1398 – The Treaty of Salynas is signed between Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas the Great and the Teutonic Knights, who received Samogitia.
1492 – Christopher Columbus’s expedition makes landfall in the Caribbean, specifically in The Bahamas. The explorer believes he has reached the Indies.
1582 – Because of the implementation of the Gregorian calendar this day does not exist in this year in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
1748 – British and Spanish naval forces engage at the Battle of Havana during the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
1792 – The first celebration of Columbus Day is held in New York City.
1798 – Flemish and Luxembourgish peasants launch the rebellion against French rule known as the Peasants’ War.
1799 – Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse was the first woman to jump from a balloon with a parachute, from an altitude of 900 meters.
1810 – First Oktoberfest: The Bavarian royalty invites the citizens of Munich to join the celebration of the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria to Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen.
1822 – Pedro I of Brazil is proclaimed the emperor of the Empire of Brazil.
1823 – Charles Macintosh of Scotland sells the first raincoat.
1847 – German inventor and industrialist Werner von Siemens founds Siemens & Halske, which later becomes Siemens AG.
1871 – Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) enacted by British rule in India, which named over 160 local communities ‘Criminal Tribes’, i.e. hereditary criminals. Repealed in 1949, after Independence of India.
1892 – The Pledge of Allegiance is first recited by students in many US public schools, as part of a celebration marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage.
1901 – President Theodore Roosevelt officially renames the “Executive Mansion” to the White House.
1915 – World War I: British nurse Edith Cavell is executed by a German firing squad for helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium
1917 – World War I: The First Battle of Passchendaele takes place resulting in the largest single day loss of life in New Zealand history.
1933 – The military Alcatraz Citadel becomes the civilian Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
1942 – World War II: Japanese ships retreat after their defeat in the Battle of Cape Esperance.
1944 – World War II: The Axis occupation of Athens comes to an end.
1959 – At the national congress of APRA in Peru a group of leftist radicals are expelled from the party who later form APRA Rebelde.
1960 – Cold War: Nikita Khrushchev pounds his shoe on a desk at United Nations General Assembly meeting to protest a Philippine assertion of Soviet Union colonial policy being conducted in Eastern Europe
1964 – The Soviet Union launches the Voskhod 1 into Earth orbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew and the first flight without space suits
1967 – Vietnam War: US Secretary of State Dean Rusk states during a news conference that proposals by the U.S. Congress for peace initiatives are futile because of North Vietnam’s opposition
1968 – Equatorial Guinea becomes independent from Spain.
1970 – Vietnam War: US President Richard Nixon announces that the United States will withdraw 40,000 more troops before Christmas
1983 – Japan’s former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei is found guilty of taking a $2 million bribe from Lockheed and is sentenced to four years in jail.
1984 – Brighton hotel bombing: The Provisional Irish Republican Army attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. Thatcher escapes but the bomb kills five people and wounds 31.
1994 – The Magellan spacecraft burns up in the atmosphere of Venus.
1999 – Pervez Musharraf takes power in Pakistan from Nawaz Sharif through a bloodless coup.
1999 – The former Autonomous Soviet Republic of Abkhazia declares its independence from Georgia
2000 – The USS Cole is badly damaged in Aden, Yemen, by two suicide bombers, killing 17 crew members and wounding at least 39.
2002 – Terrorists detonate bombs in the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 and wounding over 300.
2005 – The second Chinese human spaceflight Shenzhou 6 launched carrying Fèi Jùnlóng and Niè Hǎishèng for five days in orbit.