16th October
1934 Mao Zedong & 25,000 troops begin 6,000 miles Long March
1942 Cyclone in the Bay of Bengal kills some 40,000 south of Calcutta India
1951 1st Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, is assassinated by Said Akbar in Rawalpindi
17th October
1933 Albert Einstein arrives in the US as a refugee from Nazi Germany
1979 Mother Teresa of Calcutta awarded Nobel Peace Prize
18th October
1775 African-American poet Phillis Wheatley freed from slavery
1867 Alaska Purchase: US takes formal possession of Alaska from Russia, having paid $7.2 million
19th October
1910 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, India, astrophysicist (Nobel 1983)
1960 Martin Luther King Jr. arrested in Atlanta sit-in
20th October
1864 US President Abraham Lincoln formally establishes Thanksgiving as a national holiday 1971 West German Chancellor Willy Brandt is awarded Nobel Peace Prize
21st October
1805 Battle of Trafalgar: British Admiral Horatio Nelson defeats combined French and Spanish fleet. Nelson shot and killed during the battle.
1958 1st women in the British House of Lords
22nd October
1721 Tsar Peter the Great becomes “All-Russian Imperator”
1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. adopts Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) worldwide, creating 24 international time zones with longitude zero at the Greenwich meridian
1975 Soviet spacecraft Venera 9 soft-lands on Venus, becoming the first lander to return images from the surface of another planet
