On Oct. 13, A.D. 54, Roman Emperor Claudius I died after being poisoned by his wife, Agrippina.
In 1775 the Continental Congress ordered construction of a naval fleet, thereby launching the Navy.
In 1792 the cornerstone of the executive mansion, later known as the White House, was laid during a ceremony in the District of Columbia.
In 1843 the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith was founded in New York.
In 1845 Texas ratified a state constitution.
In 1943 Italy declared war on Germany, its former Axis partner.
In 1944 American troops entered Aachen, Germany.
In 1962 ”Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by Edward Albee opened on Broadway.
In 1981 voters in Egypt participated in a referendum to elect Vice President Hosni Mubarak as president, one week after the slaying of Anwar Sadat.
In 1987 Costa Rican President Oscar Arias was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of a Central American peace plan.
In 1990 Le Duc Tho, co-founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party, died in Hanoi; he was 79.
In 1993 a German who had stabbed tennis star Monica Seles received a suspended jail term.
In 1994 pro-British Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland announced a cease-fire matching the Irish Republican Army’s 6-week-old truce. Also in 1994 Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize in literature.
In 1995 British physicist Joseph Rotblat and the anti-nuclear group he founded, the Pugwash Conference, were named winners of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1997 a jet-powered car driven by British Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green streaked across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert at speeds topping 764 m.p.h., faster than the speed of sound. However, the car couldn’t complete two runs within the 60 minutes required by record-keepers. (Green officially broke the record two days later.)
In 1999, in Boulder, Colo., the JonBenet Ramsey grand jury was dismissed after 13 months of work with prosecutors saying there wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone in the 6-year-old’s strangulation.
In 2000 Gus Hall, the onetime labor official and longtime American communist leader, died in New York; he was 90.
In 2001 Ukraine’s defense minister and air defense chief offered to resign, conceding that the military was involved in the explosion of a Russian airliner over the Black Sea on Oct. 4 that killed 78 people.
In 2002 historian Stephen Ambrose died in Bay St. Louis, Miss.; he was 66.
