October 7

1571 – In the last great clash of galleys, the Ottoman navy is defeated at Lepanto, Greece by a Christian naval coalition under the command of Spain’s Don Juan de Austria

1708 – Indian guru, Guru Gobind Singh, dies

1746 – Composer, William Billings, is born

1765 – Delegates from nine of the American colonies meet in New York to discuss the Stamp Act crisis and colonial response to it

1780 – Patriot militia under Colonel William Campbell defeat Loyalist militia under Major Patrick Ferguson at the Battle of King’s Mountain in North Carolina during the Revolutionary War

1792 – American politician, George Mason, dies

1816 – First double-decked steamboat, the Washington, arrives in New Orleans

1849 – Edgar Allan Poe dies in Baltimore

1849 – Poet, James Whitcomb Riley, is born

1864 – Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s troops are turned back by Union forces when they try to regain ground that had been lost around Richmond, Virginia in the Battle of Darbytown Road during the Civil War

1870 – French Minister of the Interior Leon Gambetta escapes besieged Paris by balloon, reaching the French provisional government in Tours

1871 – The most devastating fire in US history is ignited in Wisconsin in the forest. The blaze took out entire villages, killing everyone. Many people who escaped to the river, then drowned; those who escaped to a water tank were boiled alive. Temperatures reached 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, causing trees to literally explode in the flames. In two days time, 1,200 people had died and 2 billion trees were destroyed

1885 – Physicist whose model of atomic structure helped establish quantum theory, Niels Bohr is born

1896 – English wife of Charles Darwin, Emma Darwin, dies

1900 – Nazi leader, Heinrich Himmler, is born

1907 – Writer, Helen MacInnes, is born

1913 – In attempting to find ways to lower the cost of the automobile and make it affordable to ordinary Americans, Henry Ford began an assembly line that reduced the time it took to manufacture a car from 12 hours to 93 minutes

1914 – German forces bombard the Belgian city of Antwerp during World War I

1931 – South African religious leader, Desmond Tutu, is born

1934 – Playwright, Leroi Jones, is born

1935 – Novelist and author, Thomas Keneally, is born

1940 – German troops occupy Romania during World War II, in an effort to create a front to intimidate the Soviet Union

1944 – Prisoner uprising at Birkenau concentration camp

1949 – East Germany, the German Democratic Republic is formed

1952 – Former prime minister and current president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is born

1955 – Cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, is born

1955 – Poet, Alan Ginsberg, reads his poem “Howl” at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco, and was a monumental success in the literary world

1957 – A fire in the Windscale plutonium production reactor north of Liverpool, England, spreads radioactive iodine and polonium through the countryside and into the Irish Sea destroying livestock in the area, 500,000 gallons of milk and causing at least 30, possibly as many as 1,000 cancer deaths

1960 – “Route 66” premieres on CBS

1960 – John Kennedy and Richard Nixon debate Cold War foreign policy

1967 – Actress, singer, songwriter, and producer, Toni Braxton, is born

1969 – General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, reports that “progress in Vietnamization is steadily and realistically achieved” but that US troops would have to assist the South Vietnamese “for some time to come”

1970 – President Richard Nixon announces a five-point proposal to end the Vietnam War, but the proposals would be rejected by the Communists a few days later

1975 – New York State Supreme Court judge reverses a deportation order for John Lennon, who had rubbed some wrong politically in his highly public association with anti-Vietnam War protestors, under the premise that “selective deportation based upon secret political grounds” was not to be condoned

1976 – Hua Guofeng, premier of the People’s Republic of China, succeeds the late Mao Zedong as chairman of the Communist Party of China

1982 – English soccer player, Jermain Defoe, is born

1983 – Sean Connery stars in Never Say Never Again

1984 – Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton becomes the NFL’s all-time rushing leader

1985 – Four Palestinian Liberation Organization hijackers seize the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and demand the release of 50 Palestinians held by Israel

1993 – The Great Flood of 1993 on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers ends. It was the worst US flood since 1927

1996 – Fox News Channel begins broadcasting

2001 – US invasion of Afghanistan in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 begins; it will become the longest war in US history

2003 – California voters remove Democratic governor Gray Davis from office in the state’s first successful recall of a sitting governor; a Republican candidate, bodybuilder/actor Arnold Schwarzenegger wins the election to replace Davis 17 days later

2012 – Mexican drug lord, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, dies