THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― OCTOBER 20

October 20 is the 293rd day of the year (294th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 72 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Sunday or Monday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Wednesday or Friday (56).

NATIONAL BRANDIED FRUIT DAY 

1720 – Caribbean pirate (John "Jack" Rackham) Calico Jack is captured by the Royal Navy. He was hanged in November of that year in Port Royal, Jamaica.

1740 – Maria Theresa (Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina) takes the throne of Austria. France, Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony refuse to honor the Pragmatic Sanction and the War of the Austrian Succession begins.

1818 – The Convention of 1818 is signed between the United States and the United Kingdom, which settles the Canada–United States border on the 49th parallel for most of its length.

1910 – The hull of the RMS Olympic, sister-ship to the ill-fated RMS Titanic, is launched from the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

1941 – World War II: Thousands of civilians in Kragujevac in German-occupied Serbia are murdered in the Kragujevac massacre.

1944 – Liquefied natural gas leaks from storage tanks in Cleveland, OH and then explodes; the explosion and resulting fire level 30 blocks and kill 130.

1961 – The Soviet Union performs the first armed test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile, launching an R-13 from a Golf-class submarine.

1968 – Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy marries Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. At the time he was 62 and she was 39.

1973 – "Saturday Night Massacre": United States President Richard Nixon fires U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus after they refuse to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who is finally fired by Robert Bork.

1981 – Two police officers and an armored car guard are killed during an armed robbery in Rockland County, New York, carried out by members of the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground.

1991 – The Oakland Hills firestorm kills 25 and destroys 3,469 homes and apartments, causing more than $2 billion in damage.

2011 – Libyan Civil War: National Transitional Council rebel forces capture ousted Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in his hometown of Sirte and kill him shortly thereafter.

TODAY'S BIRTHS

1632 – Christopher Wren, English physicist, mathematician, and architect, designed St Paul's Cathedral (d. 1723)

1891 – James Chadwick, English physicist and academic, NobePrize laureate (d. 1974)

1925 – Art Buchwald, American soldier and journalist (d. 2007)

1936 – Bobby Seale, American activist, co-founded the Black Panther Party

1946 – Diana Gittins, American-English sociologist, author, and academic

1950 – Tom Petty, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 2017)

From Wikipedia and Google, except as noted.