This Day In History Thread: Because We Need One?

[factotum]

October 19 1781: Lord Cornwallis British army surrenders to the French-American forces after the siege of Yorktown.
October 19 1812: French forces retreats from Moscow, thus beginning the end of Napoleons Russian campaign.

Didn't I already do those?

[Killer Angel]

I don't think Italy ever officially declared war on Germany

It was a new and provisional government, ruled by gen. Badoglio, but yeah.

Didn't I already do those?

They are important!

[Aolbain]

Didn't I already do those?

That you did

[Shekinah]

October 20, 1976: The ferry George Prince is struck by a ship while crossing the Mississippi River between Desterehan and Luling, Louisiana. Seventy-eight passengers and crew die, and only eighteen people aboard the ferry survive.

[Neli42]

Not to nit pick, but the Loma Prieta Earthquake was 6.9 on the Richter Scale. The SF earthquake of 1906 was 7.1.

My apologies; You are correct. This source had it wrong.

[Eldan]

October 20:
1314: Ludwig of Bavaria is elected Holy Roman King, but not yet Emperor. Other electors have elected Friedrich the Beautiful of Habsburg instead, so war breaks out.
1714: George Louis/Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hannover, is elected King of Great Britain and Ireland.
1803: Louisiana Purchase. The United States buy the colony of Louisana from Napoleon. The former colony makes up a huge part of the United States: Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and parts of Minnesota, North Dakota, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, as well as parts of modern Canada.
1825: King Ludwig declares that his nation (Bavaria) shall henceforth be spelt "Bayern" instead of "Baiern".
1860: Austria switches to constitutional monarchy.
1983: The meter, the SI unit for length, is redefined using the speed of light as a base.

[Asta Kask]

1632 - Christopher Wren is born

[Hbgplayer]

My apologies; You are correct. This source had it wrong.

Not a problem. I live about an hour north of San Francisco, and we were bombarded with 25th anniversary memorials and all that good stuff for a week leading up to it, so I know all about it, despite it occurred exactly 3 years before I was born.

1818: Convention of 1818 between the US and Britain agreed on the 49th Parallel as the border between the US and Canada across the rest of the continent.
1931: Mickey Mantel, American baseball legend, was born

[rs2excelsior]

Mussolini didn't die until 1945 and I don't think Italy ever officially declared war on Germany

I was mistaken on Mussolini's death; he was rescued by German special forces and taken to Germany. But his government was deposed, King Victor Emmanuel III reasserted power, appointed Badoglio to replace Mussolini, and had Mussolini arrested. After that, Italy's new government signed an armistice with the Allies, and later declared war on Germany. The Germans seized Rome and continued to fight Allied advances in Italy. Some Italian soldiers joined the Allies, some continued to fight with the Germans.

From Wikipedia:

Some prominent members of Mussolini's government had turned against him by this point. Among them were Grandi and Ciano. With several of his colleagues close to revolt, Mussolini was forced to summon the Grand Council of Fascism on 24 July 1943: the first time that body had met since the start of the war. When he announced that the Germans were thinking of evacuating the south, Grandi launched a blistering attack on him. Grandi moved a resolution asking the king to resume his full constitutional powers, in effect, a vote of no confidence in Mussolini. This motion carried by a 19–7 margin. Despite this sharp rebuke, Mussolini showed up for work the next day as usual. He allegedly viewed the Grand Council as merely an advisory body and did not think the vote would have any substantive effect. That afternoon, he was summoned to the royal palace by King Victor Emmanuel III, who had been planning to oust Mussolini earlier. When Mussolini tried to tell the king about the meeting, Victor Emmanuel cut him off and told him that he was being replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio. After Mussolini left the palace, he was arrested by Carabinieri on the king's orders.


Mussolini rescued by German troops from his prison in Campo Imperatore on 12 September 1943.
By this time, discontent with Mussolini was such that when the news of his downfall was announced on the radio, there was no resistance. In an effort to conceal his location from the Germans, Mussolini was moved around the country before being sent to Campo Imperatore, a mountain resort in Abruzzo where he was completely isolated. Given the large Nazi presence in Italy, Badoglio announced that "the war continues at the side of our Germanic ally" in the hopes that chaos and Nazi retaliation against civilians could be avoided. Even as Badoglio was keeping up the appearance of loyalty to the Axis, he dissolved the Fascist Party two days after taking over. Also, his government was negotiating an Armistice with the Allies, which was signed on 3 September 1943. Its announcement five days later threw Italy into chaos, a civil war of sorts. Badoglio and the king fled Rome, leaving the Italian Army without orders. Immediately after the Italian surrender was announced, German troops started taking over the Italian Peninsula by force as part of Operation Achse and occupied Rome on 10 September. After a period of anarchy, Italy finally declared war on Nazi Germany on 13 October 1943 from Malta; thousands of troops were supplied to fight against the Germans, others refused to switch sides and had joined the Germans. The Badoglio government held a social truce with the leftist partisans for the sake of Italy and to rid the land of the Nazis.

[thorgrim29]

And one italian submarine crew ended up fighting for Japan

[Aedilred]

21st October

1096 - The People's Crusade, the first wave of western crusaders responding to the call for the First Crusade, is nearly completely destroyed in the Battle of Civetot.

1422 - Death of Charles VI of France, a few days after his son-in-law Henry V, inaugurating a period of strife between royal factions in the French government that result in the near-complete collapse of the Valois kingdom before the rise of Joan of Arc.

1805 - Nelson wins the Battle of Trafalgar, putting an end to Napoleon's hopes of invading Britain and enshrining the legends of British hegemony at sea and Royal Navy invincibility that was to endure for at least another hundred years.

1971 - Birth of Damien Martyn, an outrageously talented, elegant and widely underrated cricketer.

[Gwynfrid]

October 21, 1945: French women vote for the first time.

[Sylthia]

Not a problem. I live about an hour north of San Francisco, and we were bombarded with 25th anniversary memorials and all that good stuff for a week leading up to it, so I know all about it, despite it occurred exactly 3 years before I was born.

1818: Convention of 1818 between the US and Britain agreed on the 49th Parallel as the border between the US and Canada across the rest of the continent.
1931: Mickey Mantel, American baseball legend, was born

I think the 49th parallel only extended to the Oregon Territory at that point. It wouldn't extend to the ocean 1846, I think. 54•40 or Fight! and all that.

[Shekinah]

October 22, 1938: Christopher Lloyd is born.

[Gwynfrid]

October 22, 1895: The Granville-Paris Express arrives at the Gare de l'Ouest (present-day Montparnasse) too fast, and its air brake fails. The train overruns the buffer stop, runs accross the station, crashes through the wall and falls 10 meters into the street below. One woman is killed by falling masonry.

[Sylthia]

October 22, 1938: Christopher Lloyd is born.

It's a pretty cold process, coming out of the womb, into the big wide world. You might say he was frozen that day.

[Shekinah]

It's a pretty cold process, coming out of the womb, into the big wide world. You might say he was frozen that day.

No. Leave.

[Neli42]

22 OCT

1797 - André-Jacques Garnerin makes a parachute jump from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet above Paris. It is widely considered to be the first parachute jump of note.

1811 - Pianist and composer Franz Liszt is born.

1918 - The first case of the Spanish Flu is reported, heralding the worldwide pandemic that eventually took an estimated 20 million lives.

1958 - USA's Food and Drug Administration bans red dye #4 after it is linked to tumor production in dogs.

1962 - US President John F. Kennedy announces the discovery of Soviet missile bases under construction and nearing completion in Cuba. He responds with a naval "quarantine" to prevent the delivery of more missiles.

1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He declines to accept it.

2012 - Cyclist Lance Armstrong is stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and banned from competitive cycling for life in consequence of systematic use of performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions throughout his career.

[Mono Vertigo]

October 22, 1985: The Granville-Paris Express arrives at the Gare de l'Ouest (present-day Montparnasse) too fast, and its air brake fails. The train overruns the buffer stop, runs accross the station, crashes through the wall and falls 10 meters into the street below. One woman is killed by falling masonry.

Psssht... that was in the 19th century, not the 20th. The curse of the 19XX strikes again!

[Gwynfrid]

Psssht... that was in the 19th century, not the 20th. The curse of the 19XX strikes again!

No idea where you took that quote from

[Sylthia]

No idea where you took that quote from

I made a similar mistake a few days ago. It seems I'm not the only one who does it.

[factotum]

Oct 23rd 1956: the Hungarian Uprising starts, with tens of thousands of people protesting against Soviet rule. Unrest continues until the USSR invades the country and crushes the resistance.

2001: The IRA announce they are to start decommissioning their weapons in response to advances in the Northern Ireland peace process.

2002: Chechen rebels storm a Moscow theatre and take the 700 people inside hostage.

[hannaze]

I think it was on September 10, 1939, when Canada entered World War II

[Gwynfrid]

October 23, 1942: In El-Alamein in Egypt, British Commonwealth troops led by Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery begin their attack against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Panzer Army Africa. The battle marks the first major Axis defeat and a key turning point in World War II, prompting the comment by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: "Now this is not the end; it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

[Shekinah]

October 23, 1935: Dutch Schultz, Abe Landau, Otto Berman, and Bernard "Lulu" Rosencrantz are fatally shot at a saloon in Newark, New Jersey in what will be known as the Chophouse Massacre.

[Aedilred]

42BC - Second Battle of Philippi. The tyrannicides are decisively defeated by Octavian and Mark Antony. Brutus commits suicide. Many other young Roman noblemen are also killed, including Octavian's future father-in-law Livius Drusus Claudianus (a fact which in the novel I, Claudius formed part of Livia's motive for her extermination of the house
of Julius). One of the various dates that could be cited as the final end of the old Roman Republic.

1295 - Agreement of the Treaty of Paris, which will develop into the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France.

1642 - Battle of Edgehill, the first major engagement of the Civil War. The king generally has the better of the battle but is unable to press his advantage and the advance on London peters out, which will ultimately prove ruinous to the royalist cause. Blame for the king's not winning a decisive victory is variously attributed to the royalist cavalry commanders.

1739 - Start of the War of Jenkins' Ear between Britain and Spain, eight years after the separation of the eponymous ear from its owner.

1900 - Birth of Douglas Jardine, a great batsman, and arguably the best and almost certainly the most controversial England cricket captain of all time.

[Gwynfrid]

1739 - Start of the War of Jenkins' Ear between Britain and Spain, eight years after the separation of the eponymous ear from its owner.

Coolest name for a war ever

Oh, and I think you meant the English Civil War? Lots of countries have had at least one of those.

[Aedilred]

Coolest name for a war ever

I also like the Opium Wars, although that's at least as much for the reasoning behind them as the name.

Oh, and I think you meant the English Civil War? Lots of countries have had at least one of those.

I did, I forget about that sort of thing. Even we've had several; that's just the only one called the Civil War. Or, rather, the Civil Wars, since there was a sequence of them.

[Sylthia]

I did, I forget about that sort of thing. Even we've had several; that's just the only one called the Civil War. Or, rather, the Civil Wars, since there was a sequence of them.

One must never be too cavalier when throwing that term around.

[Gwynfrid]

October 24, 1795: Third partition of Poland. Prussia acquires the area around Warsaw, Russia gets the largest portion around Vilnius, and Austria gobbles up Lublin and Krakow. Poland ceases to exist as an independent state for the next 123 years, until brought back in the treaty of Versailles.