On Oct. 16, 1790, Congress established the District of Columbia as the seat of the government.
In 1793 leaders of the French Revolution beheaded the queen, Marie Antoinette.
In 1859 Kansas abolitionist John Brown led 20 men in a raid on the U.S. arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Va.
In 1916, in New York, Margaret Sanger opened the nation’s first birth-control clinic.
In 1946, 10 Nazis were hanged in Germany following the Nuremberg war-crimes trial.
In 1964 China became the world’s fifth atomic power.
In 1970 Anwar Sadat became president of Egypt, succeeding the late Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In 1978 Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland was elected pope, making him the first non-Italian pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in 465 years. (He took the name John Paul II.)
In 1981 Moshe Dayan, former Israeli general and foreign minister, died at 66.
In 1984 Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of non-violent struggle for racial equality in South Africa.
In 1985 a body found on a Syrian shore was identified as that of Leon Klinghoffer, the American who was slain and thrown overboard during the guerrilla hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in the Mediterranean.
In 1991 gunman George Hennard crashed into a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and killed 23 people before taking his own life.
In 1995 Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan presided over a gathering estimated at 800,000 on the National Mall in Washington as part of his Million Man March to demonstrate unity among black men.
In 1997 author James Michener died at 90 in Austin, Texas.
In 2002 the White House announced that North Korea had disclosed it had a nuclear weapons program.
