On October 10, 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew had been at sea for more than a month since leaving the Canary Islands. Tension on the open Atlantic had reached a breaking point: 🧵

On October 9, 1825, a small sloop named Restauration sailed into New York Harbor. This marked the beginning of organized Norwegian immigration to the United States. For the 52 passengers on board, it represented a new life and a new identity for generations of Norwegians to come: 🧵

On October 8, 1967, deep in the Bolivian mountains, a small band of weary guerrilla fighters found themselves surrounded. Among them was Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who had once stood beside Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution:

On the morning of October 7, 1998, a cyclist in Laramie, Wyoming, discovered what he first thought was a scarecrow tied to a fence on the outskirts of town. It was not. It was twenty-one-year-old Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming: 🧵

On October 6, 1849, thirteen men faced their deaths in the city of Arad, then part of the Austrian Empire. They were generals of the Hungarian army, executed for fighting to free their homeland: 🧵

In the early evening of October 5, 1607, one of Venice’s most respected minds was nearly silenced forever. Paolo Sarpi, a Servite friar, scientist, and political advisor, was attacked just steps from his home. The assault was brutal: 🧵

In late 2006, a small group of activists, journalists, and technologists came together around a simple but radical idea: to create a platform where anyone could anonymously publish classified or sensitive information in the public interest. This idea became WikiLeaks: 🧵

On October 3, 1995, former football star O. J. Simpson was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. The verdict came after nearly nine months of testimony, arguments, and media coverage that reached far beyond the courtroom: 🧵

Cheese has caused its fair share of quarrels, but in Nottingham on October 2, 1766 it sparked a full scale riot. At the annual Goose Fair that year, the cost of cheese had risen sharply, and ordinary townspeople were not willing to accept the price hike: 🧵

On October 1, 1908, a car went on sale that would change everything. The Ford Motor Company introduced the Model T, offering it to the public at a price of 825 dollars. It was not the first automobile, but it became the one that put driving within reach of everyday Americans: 🧵

On September 30, 1551, one of the most powerful warlords of western Japan met his end not on the battlefield but inside a temple. Ōuchi Yoshitaka, head of the Ōuchi clan, died at his own hands during what became known as the Tainei-ji incident: 🧵

On September 29, 1957, a quiet industrial town in the Ural Mountains became the site of one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. Known today as the Kyshtym disaster, it took place at the Mayak Production Association, a secret Soviet facility built for producing plutonium during the Cold War: 🧵

On September 28, 1928, Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist working at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, noticed something unusual on a culture plate he had left unattended. A mold (Penicillium notatum) had grown on the plate and was killing the colonies of Staphylococcus bacteria around it: 🧵

On September 27, 1949, a little-known designer named Zeng Liansong had a flag design that would change history. His simple vision of one large star and four smaller ones became was selected as the symbol of the People’s Republic of China: 🧵

On September 26, 1960, the first live televised debate between two presidential candidates occurred. Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy met in Chicago. For the first time, voters were not only listening to what the candidates said but also watching how they looked and carried themselves: 🧵

On September 25, 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, leading a small expedition across the Isthmus of Panama, became the first European known to have reached the eastern shore of what would later be called the Pacific Ocean: 🧵

On September 24, 1864, Finnish writer Aleksis Kivi’s play Heath Cobblers premiered, marking the first time a full length play written in Finnish was performed publicly. In a country where Swedish had long dominated literature and theatre, this was a a huge moment for Finnish cultural identity: 🧵

On September 23, 1459, the fields of Staffordshire saw the first major clash of the Wars of the Roses. At Blore Heath, a Yorkist army led by Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, met a much larger Lancastrian force commanded by James Touchet, Lord Audley: 🧵

On September 22, 1827, Joseph Smith said he received the golden plates from a hill near his family’s home in upstate New York. This moment is considered the beginning of the Book of Mormon, a foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: 🧵

On September 21, 1933, Salvador Lutteroth, a former soldier and businessman, organized the first professional wrestling event in Mexico City and changed Mexican sports culture forever. What began as a small show soon grew into one of the country’s most influential forms of entertainment: 🧵

On September 20, 1187, Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, began his siege of Jerusalem. Its walls once again became the focus of world attention. It was a moment that would mark one of the most consequential turning points of the Crusades: 🧵

September 19, 1868 marked the beginning of La Gloriosa, the revolution that would end the reign of Queen Isabella II and reshape the Spain's political direction. The uprising was the result of years of dissatisfaction with corruption, economic troubles, and Isabella’s increasingly unpopular rule: 🧵

On September 18, 1837, a small store opened in New York City that would eventually become one of the most recognized names in luxury. This is the story of Tiffany & Co.: 🧵

On September 17, 1859, the citizens of San Francisco opened their local newspaper and found a proclamation unlike any they had ever read. A man named Joshua Abraham Norton declared himself "Norton I, Emperor of the United States": 🧵

On September 6, 1620, a group of English men, women, and children set sail from Plymouth aboard a merchant vessel called the Mayflower. Their destination was Virginia, where they hoped to establish a new settlement under the authority of the English crown: 🧵

On September 15, 1440, the French nobleman Gilles de Rais was arrested under charges that shocked everyone. Once celebrated as a military commander and a companion of Joan of Arc, he was now accused of crimes that placed him among the earliest documented serial killers in European history: 🧵

On September 14, 1901, the United States awoke to the news that President William McKinley had died in Buffalo, New York. His death was the result of gunshot wounds he had suffered days earlier, and it marked the sudden end of his presidency and the beginning of Theodore Roosevelt’s: 🧵

On September 13, 1862, Union soldiers in a Maryland field stumbled upon what looked like just some papers wrapped around three cigars. In reality, it was General Robert E. Lee’s Special Order 191, a detailed outline of Confederate movements during his invasion of the North: 🧵

On September 12, 1962, more than thirty five thousand people crowded into Rice University’s football stadium in Houston, Texas. They had come to hear President John F. Kennedy speak about the nation’s future in space: 🧵

On September 11, 1185, a single act in Constantinople set off a chain of events that ended Andronikos I Komnenos’s reign and placed Isaac Angelos on the Byzantine throne: 🧵

On September 10, 1846, Elias Howe received a United States patent that would change the way clothing and textiles were made forever. It was the sewing machine, a device that promised to take much of the endless handwork out of stitching, and it marked the beginning of a new era in manufacturing: 🧵

On September 9, 1561, the Colloquy of Poissy opened, bringing Catholic and Protestant leaders face to face in hopes of finding common ground. With tensions already running high, it was a bold experiment in dialogue at a time when Europe was being torn apart by faith: 🧵

On the evening of September 8, 1727, the village of Burwell in Cambridgeshire gathered for a puppet show that promised light entertainment. Instead, it became the site of one of the deadliest fires in eighteenth century England: 🧵

On a September 7, 1978, a man crossed Waterloo Bridge in London and felt a sharp sting in his leg. That man was Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and dissident, and what seemed like a minor injury turned out to be one of the most infamous assassinations of the Cold War: 🧵

On September 6, 1992, a group of moose hunters made a grim discovery deep in the Alaskan wilderness. Inside an abandoned bus near the Stampede Trail, they found the body of Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old who had set out months earlier on a personal quest to live off the land: 🧵

On September 5, 1698, Russian men with beards faced an unusual new law from Tsar Peter I, better known as Peter the Great. He wanted to modernize Russia along European lines. Unless you were a peasant or a member of the clergy, keeping facial hair now came with a price: 🧵

In the early hours of September 4, 1977, violence shattered the calm of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Inside the Golden Dragon restaurant, one of the most popular late-night spots in the neighborhood, a group of gunmen stormed in and opened fire: 🧵

On September 3, 301, a small community on a rocky mountain in northern Italy quietly gave birth to what would become the world’s oldest surviving republic. This was San Marino, founded by Saint Marinus, a Christian stonemason from the island of Rab in modern-day Croatia: 🧵

On September 2, 1856, one of the bloodiest internal conflicts within the Taiping Rebellion erupted in Nanjing. Known as the Tianjing Incident, it was not a clash with Qing forces but a violent struggle among the Taiping leaders themselves: 🧵

On September 1, 1878, a new voice entered history. Emma Nutt became the world’s first female telephone operator when she started working at the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company, recruited by none other than Alexander Graham Bell himself: 🧵

On August 31, 1422, one of England’s most celebrated warrior kings met an unexpectedly grim end. Henry V did not fall on the battlefield but instead died of dysentery while campaigning in France. His death left his infant son to inherit one of the most powerful thrones in Europe: 🧵

On August 30, 1918, shots rang out as Vladimir Lenin left a Moscow factory after giving a speech. The gunfire came from Fanni Kaplan, a revolutionary who had once supported the Bolsheviks but had turned against them after the October Revolution: 🧵

On August 29, 1604, an extraordinary moment took place in Sikh history. Guru Arjan Dev Ji, the fifth Sikh Guru, completed the compilation of the Adi Granth, the original form of what would later become the Guru Granth Sahib Ji:　🧵

On August 28, 632, Fatimah, daughter of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, died. Her death, only a few months later her father's, became one of the most debated events in Islamic history, with differing Sunni and Shia traditions shaping how it has been remembered ever since: 🧵

On August 27, 1832, the Black Hawk War came to an end when Black Hawk, the Sauk leader who had resisted U.S. expansion into his people’s homelands, surrendered to American authorities: 🧵

On August 26, 2009, Jaycee Lee Dugard, who had vanished as a child in 1991, was found alive in California after more than 18 years in captivity: 🧵

In the summer of 1894, a deadly epidemic swept through Hong Kong. It was the return of an ancient terror: the bubonic plague. On August 25, 1894, Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburō published his findings in The Lancet on the infectious agent behind the bubonic plague: 🧵

On August 24 1932, just months after her solo transatlantic flight, Amelia Earhart set out to achieve another milestone. She aimed to be the first woman to fly nonstop across the United States: 🧵

It began like something out of a Hollywood script. On the morning of August 23, 1973, in the heart of Stockholm, Sweden, a quiet bank suddenly erupted into chaos. A man in a wig, sunglasses, and a thick accent strolled into Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg Square carrying a machine gun: 🧵

They rose in the night and would not go quietly. On August 22, 1791 a coordinated uprising of enslaved people in the northern plains of Saint Domingo burst the fragile calm of the colony and set the Haitian Revolution in motion a revolution with consequences far beyond the island.