On Oct. 21, 1797, the Navy frigate Constitution, also known as “Old Ironsides,” was launched in Boston’s harbor.
In 1805 a British fleet commanded by Adm. Horatio Nelson defeated a French-Spanish fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar; Nelson was killed.
In 1833 Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who established the Nobel Prizes, was born in Stockholm.
In 1879 Thomas Edison invented an electric light at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J.
In 1917 jazz trumpeter and composer Dizzy Gillespie was born in Cheraw, S.C.
In 1944 U.S. troops captured the German city of Aachen.
In 1945 women in France were given the right to vote.
In 1959 New York’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened.
In 1964 the movie musical “My Fair Lady,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, opened in New York.
In 1966 more than 140 people, mostly children, were killed when a coal-waste landslide engulfed a school and several houses in south Wales.
In 1967 tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters marched in Washington.
In 1976 Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American honored since John Steinbeck in 1962.
In 1984 movie director Francois Truffaut, 52, died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
In 1991 American hostage Jesse Turner was freed by his kidnappers in Lebanon after nearly five years in captivity.
In 1994 the U.S. and North Korea signed an agreement requiring the communist nation to halt its nuclear program and agree to inspections. Also, the wife of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, Rosario Ames, got 5 years in prison for her role in her husband’s espionage.
In 1995 Maxene Andrews, 79, of the Andrews Sisters died in Hyannis, Mass.
In 1999 France’s highest court upheld the conviction of Maurice Papon, the former Vichy official who had fled France rather than face prison for his role in sending Jews to Nazi death camps.
In 2001 Washington postal worker Thomas Morris Jr. died of inhaled anthrax; officials closed two postal facilities and began testing thousands of postal employees.
In 2003, invoking a hastily passed law, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ordered a feeding tube reinserted into Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman at the center of a bitter right-to-die battle.
