TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, Oct. 29, the 302nd day of 2022. On this date in:

1618: Sir Walter Raleigh, the English courtier, military adventurer and poet, was executed in London for treason.

1787: The opera “Don Giovanni” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had its world premiere in Prague.

1929: “Black Tuesday” descended upon the New York Stock Exchange. Prices collapsed amid panic selling and thousands of investors were wiped out as America’s “Great Depression” began.

1940: A blindfolded Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson drew the first number – 158 – from a glass bowl in America’s first peacetime military draft.

1960: A chartered plane carrying the California Polytechnic State University football team crashed on takeoff from Toledo, Ohio, killing 22 of the 48 people on board.

1987: Following the confirmation defeat of Robert H. Bork to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, President Ronald Reagan announced his choice of Douglas H. Ginsburg, a nomination that fell apart over revelations of Ginsburg’s previous marijuana use.

2004: Four days before Election Day in the U.S., Osama bin Laden, in a videotaped statement, directly admitted for the first time that he’d ordered the September 11 attacks and told Americans “the best way to avoid another Manhattan” was to stop threatening Muslims’ security.

2005: Mourners slowly filed past the body of civil rights icon Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, just miles from the downtown street where she’d made history by refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man.

2012: Superstorm Sandy slammed ashore in New Jersey and slowly marched inland, devastating coastal communities and causing widespread power outages; the storm and its aftermath were blamed for at least 182 deaths in the U.S.

2015: Paul Ryan was elected the 54th speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.