October 8
Flames spark in the Chicago barn of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary and ignite a two-day blaze that kills between 200 and 300 residents, destroys 17,450 buildings, leaves 100,000 homeless, and causes an estimated $200 million, equivalent of $3.8 billion in today’s dollars, in damages. – 1871.
The U.S. House of Representatives votes to proceed toward impeaching president Bill Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in alleged involvement in several scandals, including allegedly improper Arkansas real-estate deals, suspected fundraising violations, claims of sexual harassment, and accusations of cronyism involving the firing of White House travel agents. – 1998.
October 9
Harnessing the power of the mighty Colorado River, Hoover Dam begins to send electricity over transmission lines spanning 266 miles to Los Angeles. – 1936.
Socialist revolutionary and Cuban guerilla leader, Che Guevara, 39, is killed by the Bolivian army. – 1967.
October 10
A former U.S. postal worker kills his former supervisor with a three-foot samurai sword, shoots the supervisor’s fiance, and shoots two former co-workers to death at the post office in Ridgewood, N.J.. His violent outburst was one of several high-profile attacks by postal workers that resulted in the addition of the phrase “going postal” to the American lexicon. – 1994.
October 11
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter wins the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” – 2002.
October 12
After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sees a Bahamian island, and thinks he has reached East Asia. -1492.
October 13
The cornerstone is laid for a presidential residence in the newly-designated capital city of Washington. In 1800, president John Adams became the first president to reside in the executive mansion, which soon became known as the White House because its white-gray Virginia freestone contrasted strikingly with the red brick of nearby buildings. – 1792.
October 14
The Cuban Missile Crisis begins and brings the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered incontrovertible evidence that Soviet-made medium-range missiles in Cuba, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, were stationed 90 miles off the American coastline. – 1962.