Events, Births and Deaths Happening on this Date

1492

(Old Style calendar; Oct. 21st New Style), Christopher Columbus arrived with his expedition in the present-day Bahamas.

1861

The Confederate ironclad Manassas attacked the northern ship Richmond on the Mississippi River.

1915

English nurse Edith Cavell was executed by the Germans in occupied Belgium during World War I.

1933

Bank robber John Dillinger escaped from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of his gang, who killed the sheriff.

1942

During World War II, Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that Italian nationals in the United States would no longer be considered enemy aliens.

1960

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev disrupted a U.N. General Assembly session by pounding his desk with a shoe during a dispute.

1971

''Jesus Christ Superstar,'' the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater on Broadway.

1973

President Nixon nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president.

1986

The superpower meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, ended in stalemate, with President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev unable to agree on arms control or a date for a full-fledged summit in the United States.

1999

Pakistan's military overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

2000

Seventeen sailors were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen.

1870

Gen. Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, Va., at age 63.

1997

Singer John Denver was killed in the crash of his privately built aircraft in Monterey Bay, Calif.; he was 53.

1998

Matthew Shepard, a gay student at University of Wyoming, died five days after he was beaten, robbed and left tied to a wooden fence post outside of Laramie.

1999

NBA hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain died at his Los Angeles home at age 63.