- 1831 – Nat Turner is arrested for leading the bloodiest slave rebellion in U.S. history.
- 1864 – Prospectors in Montana find gold in “Last Chance Gulch,” and the city of Helena is born.
- 1918 – The Ottoman Empire signs an armistice with the Allies, ending the First World War in the Middle East and bringing about the dismantling of the 600-year-old kingdom.
- 1938 – Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Some listeners panicked because of the realistic dramatization of a Martian invasion.
- 1941 – President Roosevelt approves 1 billion dollars in Lend-Lease aid to the Allied nations.
- 1944 – Anne and Margot Frank are deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they die from disease the following year, shortly before the end of World War II.
- 1945 – Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs signs a contract for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the Major League Baseball color line.
- 1961 – The Soviet Union detonates the massive 50 megaton hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba, the most powerful explosive device ever.
- 1974 – The Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman takes place in Zaire.
- 1983 – The Rev. Jesse Jackson announced plans to become the first African American to mount a full-scale campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
- 2017 – Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business associate, Rick Gates, were indicted for conspiracy, money laundering, tax fraud, and several other charges.
