Events on October 16 55
Year 456
Magister militum Ricimer defeats Emperor Avitus at Piacenza and becomes master of the Western Roman Empire.
Year 690
Empress Wu Zetian ascends to the throne of the Tang dynasty and proclaims herself ruler of the Chinese Empire.
Year 955
Battle on the Raxa: King Otto I defeats the Obotrite federation led by Nako and his brother Stoigniew near Mecklenburg.
Year 1590
Carlo Gesualdo, composer, Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, murders his wife, Donna Maria d'Avalos, and her lover Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria at the Palazzo San Severo in Naples.
Year 1780
Royalton, Vermont and Tunbridge, Vermont are the last major raids of the American Revolutionary War.
Year 1793
Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis XVI, is guillotined at the height of the French Revolution.
Year 1834
Much of the ancient structure of the Palace of Westminster in London burns to the ground.
Year 1836
Battle of Vegkop between Afrikaner voortrekkers and Matabele warriors in South Africa.
Year 1843
Sir William Rowan Hamilton comes up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers.
Year 1846
William T. G. Morton first demonstrated ether anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Ether Dome.
Year 1869
Girton College, Cambridge is founded, becoming England's first residential college for women.
Year 1906
The Captain of Köpenick fools the city hall of Köpenick and several soldiers by impersonating a Prussian officer.
Year 1909
William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz hold a summit, a first between a U.S. and a Mexican president, and they only narrowly escape assassination.
Year 1916
In Brooklyn, New York, Margaret Sanger opens the first family planning clinic in the United States.
Year 1934
Chinese Communists begin the Long March; it ended a year and four days later, by which time Mao Zedong had regained his title as party chairman.
Year 1939
World War II: No. 603 Squadron RAF intercepts the first Luftwaffe raid on Britain.
Year 1947
Republic of the Philippines takes over the administration of the Turtle Islands and the Mangsee Islands from the United Kingdom.
Year 1949
Nikos Zachariadis, leader of the Communist Party of Greece, announces a "temporary cease-fire", effectively ending the Greek Civil War.
Year 1950
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis is published, starting The Chronicles of Narnia series.
Year 1951
The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, is assassinated in Rawalpindi.
Year 1964
Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin are inaugurated as General Secretary of the CPSU and Premier, respectively and the collective leadership is established.
Year 1968
United States athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos are kicked off the US team for participating in the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute.
Year 1968
Kingston, Jamaica is rocked by the Rodney riots, inspired by the barring of Walter Rodney from the country.
Year 1968
Yasunari Kawabata becomes the first Japanese person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Year 1970
In response to the October Crisis terrorist kidnapping, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada invokes the War Measures Act.
Year 1975
The Balibo Five, a group of Australian-based television journalists based in the town of Balibo in the then Portuguese Timor (now East Timor), are killed by Indonesian troops.
Year 1975
Rahima Banu, a two-year-old girl from the village of Kuralia in Bangladesh, is the last known person to be infected with naturally occurring smallpox.
Year 1975
The Australian Coalition opposition parties using their senate majority, vote to defer the decision to grant supply of funds for the Whitlam Government's annual budget, sparking the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis.
Year 1978
Karol Wojtyla is elected Pope John Paul II after the October 1978 Papal conclave, the first non-Italian pontiff since 1523.
Year 1991
Luby's shooting: George Hennard runs amok in Killeen, Texas, killing 23 and wounding 20 in Luby's Cafeteria.
Year 1993
Anti-Nazism riot breaks out in Welling in Kent, after police stop protesters approaching the British National Party headquarters.
Year 1995
The so-called Million Man March, which, according to the National Park Service, only about 400,000 attended,[1] takes place in Washington, D.C.
Year 1996
Eighty-four people are killed and more than 180 injured as 47,000 football fans attempt to squeeze into the 36,000-seat Estadio Mateo Flores in Guatemala City.
Year 1998
Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London on a warrant from Spain requesting his extradition on murder charges.
Year 2002
Bibliotheca Alexandrina in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, a commemoration of the Library of Alexandria that was lost in antiquity, is officially inaugurated.
Year 2013
Lao Airlines Flight 301 crashes on approach to Pakse International Airport in Laos, killing 49 people.
Year 2017
Hurricane Ophelia makes eerie red sun and yellow sky from Sahara dust and ashes from Iberia causes 200,000 homes in Ireland without power and damage