ON OCTOBER 21 ...

In 1797 the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution, also known as “Old Ironsides,” was launched in Boston’s harbor.

In 1833 Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who established the Nobel Prizes, was born in Stockholm.

In 1879 Thomas Edison invented a workable electric light at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J.

In 1959 New York’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was opened to the public.

In 1995 rioting inmates surrendered control of a prison dormitory in Greenville, Ill., ending a one-day uprising that began after the government ordered federal prisons locked down nationwide.

In 2003, invoking a hastily passed law, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ordered a feeding tube reinserted into Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman at the center of a bitter right-to-die battle.

In 2012 George McGovern, a liberal icon who challenged President Richard Nixon for the White House, died in Sioux Falls, S.D.; he was 90.

In 2014 a South African judge sentenced Oscar Pistorius, the first double amputee to compete in the Olympics, to 5 years in prison in the shooting death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Feb. 14, 2013. Also in 2014 Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who guided the newspaper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, died in Washington; he was 93.