TODAY IN HISTORY
On Oct. 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, campaigning for the presidency, was shot in the chest in Milwaukee. He went ahead with a scheduled speech.
In 1930, Ethel Merman made her Broadway debut in the musical comedy “Girl Crazy” with songs by George and Ira Gershwin.
In 1933, Nazi Germany announced it was withdrawing from the League of Nations.
In 1939, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the HMS Royal Oak, a British battleship anchored at Scapa Flow in Scotland’s Orkney Islands; 833 of the more than 1,200 men aboard were killed.
In 1947, U.S. Air Force Capt. Charles E. (“Chuck”) Yeager became the first test pilot to break the sound barrier as he flew the experimental Bell XS-1 (later X-1) rocket plane over Muroc Dry Lake in California.
In 1960, the idea of a Peace Corps was suggested by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.
In 1964, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1968, the first successful live telecast from a manned U.S. spacecraft was transmitted from Apollo 7.
In 1981, the new president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, was sworn in to succeed the assassinated Anwar Sadat. Mubarak pledged loyalty to Sadat’s policies.
In 1987, a 58-hour drama began in Midland, Texas, as 18-month-old Jessica McClure slid 22 feet down a narrow abandoned well at a private day care center; she was rescued on Oct. 16.
In 2001, as U.S. jets opened a second week of raids in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush sternly rejected a Taliban offer to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a third country.
In 2003, John Allen Muhammad pleaded not guilty to murder as the first trial in the deadly Washington-area sniper rampage got under way in Virginia Beach, Va. (Muhammad was later convicted of killing Dean Harold Meyers and executed in 2009.)
In 2017, a truck bombing in Somalia’s capital killed more than 500 people in one of the world’s deadliest attacks in years; officials blamed the attack on the extremist group al-Shabab and said it was meant to target Mogadishu’s international airport, but the bomb detonated in a crowded street after soldiers opened fire.