Today in History in 1793 Marie Antoinette is executed on the guillotine; in 1909 William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz hold the first summit meeting between Presidents of the United States and Mexico, and in 1923 The Walt Disney Company is founded.

The On This Day In History archives at “Simple English Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia” contains over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few of them:

October 16 is the 289th day of the year (290th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 76 days remaining until the end of the year.

EVENTS

456 - Magister militum Ricimer defeats Emperor Avitus at Piacenza and becomes master of the Western Roman Empire.

690 - Empress Wu Zetian ascends to the throne of the Tang dynasty and proclaims herself ruler of the Chinese Empire.

1590 - Composer Carlo Gesualdo murders his wife, Donna Maria d'Avalos and her lover Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria, at the Palazzo San Saverio in Naples.

1780 - Great Hurricane of 1780 devastates the Caribbean.

1781 - George Washington captures Yorktown, Virginia, after the Siege of Yorktown.

1793 – Marie Antoinette is executed on the guillotine.

1813 - Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Leipzig between Napoleon Bonaparte and the forces of the Sixth Coalition.

1834 - Much of the ancient structure of the Palace of Westminster in London burns to the ground.

1843 - William Rowan Hamilton comes up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers.

1846 - William T. G. Morton demonstrates anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

1859 – John Brown leads a raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia).

1875 – Brigham Young University is founded in Provo, Utah.

1905 - Partition of Bengal in India.

1909 - William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz hold the first summit meeting between Presidents of the United States and Mexico.

1916 - In Brooklyn, New York, Margaret Sanger opens the first family planning clinic in the United States.

1923 – The Walt Disney Company is founded.

1934 – Chinese Communists begin the Long March.

1939 - World War II: First attack on British territory by the German Luftwaffe.

1940 – Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto is established.

1945 - The Food and Agriculture Organization is founded in Quebec City.

1946 – Execution of Nazi war criminals who were sentenced in the Nuremberg Trials.

1949 - East Germany and the Soviet Union form diplomatic relations.

1951 – Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan is assassinated.

1962 - John F. Kennedy is shown photographs of military sites in Cuba.

1963 – Ludwig Erhard is chosen to succeed Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor of Germany.

1964 - The People's Republic of China detonates its first nuclear weapon.

1964 - Leonid Brezhnev is inaugurated as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with Alexei Kosygin becoming Premier.

1968 - At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, US athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos are kicked off the US team for their part in the Black Power Salute.

1970 – In response to the October Crisis, Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invokes the War Measures Act.

1970 - The University of Augsburg in Bavaria opens.

1973 – Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho are announced as the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.

1975 - Rahima Banu, a two-year-old girl from Bangladesh, is the last person known to be infected with naturally-occurring smallpox.

1978 – Karol Wojtyła becomes Pope John Paul II.

1978 - Wanda Rutkiewicz becomes the first person from Poland, and the first European woman, to climb to the top of Mount Everest.

1984 – Desmond Tutu wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

1984 - The British TV series The Bill is first shown.

1986 – Reinhold Messner reaches the top of Lhotse in the Himalayas with Hans Kammerlander. Messner becomes the first person to climb all the mountains over 8000 metres high.

1987 – The southern part of the United Kingdom is hit by a major storm which causes a lot of damage, especially with fallen trees, and kills 18 people.

1991 - George Hennard runs amok in Killeen, Texas, killing 23 people.

1994 - The majority of voters in Finland support entry into the EU.

1995 – The Skye Bridge, linking the Isle of Skye to mainland Scotland, is opened.

1995 - Million-Man March on Washington, DC.

1996 – 84 people are crushed to death at the Estadio Mateo Flores in Guatemala.

1998 – Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London after Spain issued an arrest warrant for murder.

2002 - The Bibliotheca Alexandrina library is opened in Alexandria, Egypt.

2006 – A magnitude 6.7 earthquake hits Hawaii, causing widespread damage.

2012 - Planet Alpha Centauri Bb is discovered orbiting a star outside the Solar System.

2013 - Lao Airlines Flight 301 crashes on approach to Pakse International Airport in Laos, killing 49 people.

2013 - Erna Solberg becomes Prime Minister of Norway, succeeding Jens Stoltenberg. Solberg is Norway's second female Prime Minister, after Gro Harlem Brundtland.

2013 - US politicians agree to end the government shutdown, and narrowly avoid the United States being unable to repay its debts.

2017 - The remainder of Hurricane Ophelia hits the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

2017 - Maltese blogger and journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia is murdered in a car bomb attack.

2020 - Murder of Samuel Paty of Islamist terrorism happens.