THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― OCTOBER 14

October 14 is the 287th day of the year (288th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 78 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Wednesday, Friday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Monday or Tuesday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Thursday or Saturday (56).

BE BALD AND BE FREE DAY  

1066 – King Harold II of England is defeated by the Norman forces of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings, fought on Senlac Hill, seven miles from Hastings, England. At the end of the bloody, all-day battle, Harold was killed--shot in the eye with an arrow, according to legend--and his forces were destroyed. He was the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.

1774 – American Revolutionary War: The United Kingdom's East India Company tea ships' cargo are burned at Annapolis, Maryland.

1863 – Confederate General Robert E. Lee attempts to drive the Union army out of Virginia but fails when an outnumbered Union force repels the attacking Rebels at the Battle of Bristoe Station.

1884 – George Eastman patents paper-strip photographic film.

1912 – Before a campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Theodore Roosevelt, the presidential candidate for the Progressive Party, is shot at close range by saloonkeeper John Schrank while greeting the public in front of the Gilpatrick Hotel.

1918 – Among the German wounded in the Ypres Salient in Belgium during WWI, is Corporal Adolf Hitler, temporarily blinded by a British gas shell and evacuated to a German military hospital at Pasewalk, in Pomerania.

1933 – On October 14, 1933, Nazi Germany renounced its role in the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, setting the stage for its complete withdrawal from the League of Nations a week later. The act freed Germany to rearm as it pleased, ostensibly because the rest of the world refused to come down to their level of military preparedness.

1943 – 400 Jews escape in uprising at Sobibor extermination Camp in Poland. The camp was part of Operation Reinhard and the official Germanname was SS-Sonderkommando Sobibór. Sobibór survivor Thomas Blattlater wrote that "In the Hagen court proceedings against former Sobibór Nazis, Professor Wolfgang Scheffler, who served as an expert, estimated the total figure of murdered Jews at a minimum of 250,000."

1947 – U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.

1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis begins on October 14, 1962, bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered incontrovertible evidence that Soviet-made medium-range missiles in Cuba—capable of carrying nuclear warheads—were now stationed 90 miles off the American coastline.

1964 – African American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in America. At 35 years of age, the Georgia-born minister was the youngest person ever to receive the award.

1964 – Nikita Khrushchev is ousted as both premier of the Soviet Union and chief of the Communist Party after 10 years in power. He was succeeded as head of the Communist Party by his former protégé Leonid Brezhnev, who would eventually become the chief of state as well. 

1973 – Willie Howard Mays, Jr. gets his last hit, as the Mets beat the Oakland A's in World Series Game 2. Mays won two MVP awards and shares the record of most All-Star Games played (24) with Hank Aaron & Stan Musial. Ted Williams said, "They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays." Mays ended his career with 660 home runs, third at the time of his retirement, and currently fourth all-time. He was a center fielder and won a record-tying 12 Gold Gloves starting the year the award was introduced six seasons into his career.

1986 – Concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel wins Nobel Peace Prize. Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE (born September 30, 1928) is a Romanian-born Jewish-American professor and political activist. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Wiesel is also the Advisory Board chairman of the newspaper Algemeiner Journal. When Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," stating that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps," as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace," Wiesel had delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.


TODAY'S BIRTHS

1644 – William Penn, English businessman, founded the Province of Pennsylvania (d. 1718)

1890 – Dwight D. Eisenhower, American general and politician, 34th President of the United States (d. 1969)

1900 – W. Edwards Deming, American statistician, author, and academic (d. 1993)

1939 – Ralph Lauren, American fashion designer, founded the Ralph Lauren Corporation

From Wikipedia and Google, except as noted.