On Oct. 9, 1002, Norse mariner Leif Ericson landed in North America.
In 1635 religious dissident Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (He would become a founder of Rhode Island.)
In 1701 the Collegiate School of Connecticut, now known as Yale University, was chartered in New Haven, Conn.
In 1776 Spanish missionaries settled in present-day San Francisco.
In 1855 I.M. Singer registered a patent in New York for the first sewing machine motor.
In 1888 the Washington Monument was opened.
In 1934 Yugoslavia’s King Alexander was assassinated during a visit to Marseille, France.
In 1936 the first generator at Boulder (now Hoover) Dam began transmitting electricity to Los Angeles.
In 1940 Beatles co-founder John Lennon was born in Liverpool, England.
In 1946 the first electric blanket was manufactured in Petersburg, Va.
In 1958 Pope Pius XII died after 19 years as Roman Catholic pontiff.
In 1967 Ernesto ”Che” Guevara, the Argentine doctor and Cuban guerrilla leader, was executed in Bolivia.
In 1974 Czech-born German businessman Oskar Schindler, credited with saving about 1,200 Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, died in Frankfurt, West Germany. (He was buried in Jerusalem.)
In 1975 physicist Andrei Sakharov became the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1976 wall posters in Beijing reported that Chinese Prime Minister Hua Guofeng had been chosen to succeed Mao Tse-tung as Communist Party chairman.
In 1980 Mary Cunningham, an executive with Bendix Corp., resigned amid rumors of a romance with the company’s chairman, William Agee.
In 1981 Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin arrived in Cairo for the funeral of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
In 1986 the Senate convicted U.S. District Judge Harry Claiborne of ”high crimes and misdemeanors,” making him the fifth federal official in history to be removed from office through impeachment.
In 1987 author-diplomat Clare Boothe Luce died at 84.
In 1989 the San Francisco Giants defeated the Cubs to win the National League playoffs. The Cubs did win one game.
In 1995 an Amtrak train derailed in Arizona after saboteurs pulled 29 spikes from a stretch of track. One person was killed and 100 injured.
In 1996 , in the opening game of the American League Championship series, 12-year-old fan Jeffrey Maier turned a likely fly out into a game-tying home run by reaching over the right-field wall at Yankee Stadium and sweeping the ball into the stands with his baseball glove. (The Yankees defeated the Baltimore Orioles 5-4, in 11 innings.)
In 2001 anthrax-tainted letters postmarked in Trenton, N.J., were sent to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Also, Americans Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman and German-born U.S. resident Wolfgang Ketterle won the Nobel Prize in physics.
In 2003 a nine-day trash-haulers strike ended in Chicago, with an estimated 135,000 tons of garbage awaiting pickup.
In 2005 a driverless Volkswagen won a $2 million race across the Nevada desert, beating four other robot-guided vehicles that completed a Pentagon-sponsored contest purportedly aimed at making warfare safer for humans. Also, comedian Louis Nye died at 92 in Los Angeles.
