1745

Death of Jonathan Swift, Anglo-Irish poet, wit and satirist, best known for his masterpiece Gulliver's Travels.

1781

Lord Cornwallis surrenders to General Washington at Yorktown in Virginia, signalling the end of the American War of Independence.

1813

Napoleon is defeated by the Allies at the Battle of the Nations of Leipzig.

1864

Birth of French photographic pioneer Auguste Lumiere. With his brother Louis, he invented an early motion-picture camera and projector called the Cinematographe.

1899

Birth of Miguel Asturias, Guatemalan author awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967.

1901

Alberto Santos-Dumon, a Brazilian aviator, flies an airship around the Eiffel Tower. The trip took 30 minutes and he was awarded the Deutsche Prize.

1937

Death of Lord Rutherford, New Zealand-born physicist. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908, he is regarded as the founder of modern atomic theory.

1954

Britain and Egypt sign a new Suez Canal pact, calling for withdrawal of British troops from the canal zone within 20 months.

1987

On the day known as Black Monday, Wall Street stocks plunge a record 508 points or 22.6 per cent. The loss topped the one-day declines of October 28 and 29 in 1929 which heralded the Great Depression.

1993

Benazir Bhutto is re-elected prime minister of Pakistan.

2002

Indonesian authorities arrest Abu Bakar Baasyir, a Muslim cleric alleged to be the spiritual leader of the Jemaah Islamiah terrorist group that was the main suspect in a bombing on the island of Bali that killed more than 180 people the previous week.

2005

Chile's Supreme Court strips former dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution for corruption charges related to his multimillion-dollar bank accounts overseas.

2007

A global manhunt that began three years ago when police found hundreds of photos on the internet of a man having sex with a dozen young Asian boys ends with the arrest in Thailand of Canadian schoolteacher Christopher Paul Neil.

2008

One of only two portraits of painter Francis Bacon by his friend and fellow British artist Lucian Freud is sold at auction for more than 5.4 million pounds (US$9.4 million). — AP/REUTERS/VNS