Governor William Henry Harrison led roughly 1,000 U.S. troops against Tenskwatawa's forces near Prophetstown in the Indiana Territory, defeating the confederation Tecumseh had built to resist American expansion. Tecumseh himself was away seeking southern allies when his brother, the Prophet, ordered a premature dawn attack. The battle destroyed the movement's spiritual momentum and pushed many tribes toward alliance with Britain in the War of 1812.
Six agricultural laborers from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle, having formed a friendly society to resist further wage cuts, were sentenced under an obscure law against secret oaths and transported to penal colonies in Australia. Public outrage at the harshness of the sentence sparked one of Britain's first large-scale labor protests, with tens of thousands marching in London, and the men were eventually pardoned and returned home, becoming enduring icons of the British trade union movement.
Maria Skłodowska, who would become Marie Curie, was born in Warsaw under Russian occupation, where Polish women were barred from universities. She moved to Paris in 1891, studied at the Sorbonne, and with her husband Pierre discovered polonium and radium, coining the term "radioactivity." She won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, the only person ever to win Nobels in two distinct sciences.
Only four days after Panama declared independence from Colombia—with tacit American naval support blocking Colombian troops from suppressing the revolt—President Theodore Roosevelt's administration extended diplomatic recognition to the new republic. The swift move let Washington negotiate the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty weeks later, granting the U.S. control of the Canal Zone and setting the stage for construction of the Panama Canal, completed in 1914.
Under the cover of darkness, armed workers, soldiers, and sailors loyal to the Bolsheviks occupied bridges, railway stations, and the telephone exchange before storming the Winter Palace, seat of the Provisional Government. Resistance was minimal; the government's defenders had largely melted away. By dawn the Bolsheviks controlled the capital, and Lenin proclaimed a new government of workers' and soldiers' councils, setting in motion the creation of the Soviet Union.
In one of the last great cavalry actions in military history, mounted lancers from the princely states of Jodhpur and Mysore, serving under British command, charged uphill through machine-gun and artillery fire to capture Ottoman and German gun positions overlooking Haifa. The victory, achieved with lances and swords against modern weaponry, opened the road to the city's capture and became a celebrated feat of Indian military valor still commemorated annually in Jodhpur and Haifa.
Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee whose family had just been deported from Germany to Poland under brutal conditions, shot German embassy official Ernst vom Rath in Paris. Vom Rath died two days later. Nazi propaganda seized on the killing to justify Kristallnacht, the nationwide pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, in which mobs destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues and Jews were sent en masse to concentration camps.
The Swedish Academy announced that Albert Camus, author of The Stranger and The Plague, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human condition." At 44, he was one of the youngest laureates ever honored, and the announcement stunned even Camus, who reportedly told a friend he thought Andre Malraux deserved it more.
Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Republican Barry Goldwater with over 61% of the popular vote, one of the largest landslides in American history, while Democrats won huge majorities in both houses of Congress. The result gave Johnson the mandate and votes he needed to push through his Great Society agenda, including Medicare, Medicaid, and civil rights legislation, in the following two years.
NASA's second crewed Moon landing mission launched into cloudy skies, and the Saturn V rocket triggered a lightning strike just 36 seconds after liftoff, causing a power surge that knocked out much of the spacecraft's instrumentation. Flight controller John Aaron's calm call of 'try SCE to Aux' allowed the crew to restore telemetry, and the mission continued successfully, with astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landing on the Moon days later in the Ocean of Storms.
Facing weeks of mass demonstrations and an exodus of citizens fleeing through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the entire Council of Ministers of East Germany resigned, a stunning collapse of authority for the ruling Communist party. The move came just two days before border crossings in Berlin would open, an event that would send jubilant crowds surging through the Wall and effectively end 28 years of division between East and West Berlin.