On Oct. 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived with his expedition in the present-day Bahamas.
In 1870 Gen. Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, Va.; he was 63.
In 1933 bank robber John Dillinger escaped from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of his gang, which killed the sheriff.
In 1942, Atty. Gen. Francis Biddle announced that Italian nationals in the United States would no longer be considered enemy aliens.
In 1964 the Soviet Union launched a Voskhod space capsule with a three-man crew on the first manned mission involving more than one crew member.
In 1968 the 19th Summer Olympics officially opened in Mexico City.
In 1973 President Richard Nixon nominated House minority leader Gerald Ford of Michigan to succeed Spiro Agnew as vice president.
In 1976 it was announced in China that Hua Guo-feng had been named to succeed the late Mao Tse-tung as chairman of the Communist Party.
In 1986 the superpower meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, ended in stalemate, with President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev unable to agree on arms control or a date for a full-fledged summit in the United States.
In 1990 the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to condemn Israel’s security forces for killing 17 Palestinian demonstrators on the Temple Mount.
In 1991, testifying for a second day on sexual harassment charges leveled by law professor Anita Hill, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas told the Senate Judiciary Committee he would “rather die than withdraw,” and repeated his denial of Hill’s allegations.
In 1993 the Toronto Blue Jays won their second straight American League pennant, defeating the White Sox in six games.
In 1995, after a 48-hour delay, the U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Bosnia-Herzegovina went into effect.
In 1997 singer John Denver was killed in the crash of his privately built aircraft in Monterey Bay, Calif.; he was 53.
In 1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, died five days after being beaten and lashed to a fence; two men were charged with his murder. (Russell Henderson later pleaded guilty to murder; a second suspect, Aaron McKinney, was convicted of murder; both were sentenced to life in prison.)
In 1999 Pakistan’s military overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Also in 1999 NBA Hall of Famer Wilt Chamberlain died in Los Angeles; he was 63.
In 2000 seventeen sailors were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
