This Day in History
1492: New World sighted
The New World was “discovered” this day in 1492 when land (most likely San Salvador) was sighted in the Caribbean from the Pinta, one of the three ships that participated in Christopher Columbus's historic first voyage.
More events on this day
2001: The centennial Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations, and to the United Nations.
1898: A landmark in labour union history, a coal-mine riot took place in Virden, Illinois, when strikebreakers were brought in.
1896: Eugenio Montale, Italian poet, prose writer, editor, and translator who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975, was born in Genoa.
1866: Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Party prime minister of the United Kingdom—in the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929–31 and in the national coalition government of 1931–35—was born.
1810: The first Oktoberfest was celebrated in Munich, Germany, in the form of a horse race held in honour of the marriage of the crown prince of Bavaria (who later became King Louis I) to Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen. |
