October 7

3761 BC – The world is created according to the Hebrew calendar.

1571 – The coalition fleet of the Holy League defeats the fleet of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras off Lepanto, Greece.

1691 – The charter for the Province of Massachusetts Bay is issued by King William and Queen Mary of England.

1763 – King George III issues a royal proclamation, closing indian lands in North America north and west of the Alleghenies to white settlements.

1777 – American troops under General Gates defeat the British under General Burgoyne at Bemis Heights along the Hudson river in Saratoga county, New York

1780 – Revolutionary militia defeat royalist militia led by British Major Patrick Ferguson, who is killed in the battle, at King’s Mountain, South Carolina.

1826 – The Quincy Granite Railway begins operations as the first chartered railway in the U.S., for construction of the Bunker Hill Monument, carrying granite from Quincy, Massachusetts, to the Neponset River in Milton for further ferry downriver.

1864 – The Union sloop of war USS Wachusett, under Commander Napoleon Collins, illegally engages and captures the Confederate sloop of war CSS Florida, under Lieutenant Charles Morris, in the neutral Port of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, causing an diplomatic incident between the U.S. and Brazil.

1868 – Cornell University opens for business

1913 – Ford Motor Company begins operations using the first moving Model T assembly line, developed from an ideas of William Klann upon his return from visiting a slaughterhouse in Chicago where cattle were processed – ‘disassembled’ – on a moving conveyor.

1916 – Georgia Tech defeats Cumberland University 222–0 in the most lopsided college football game in American history.

1940 –A memorandum sent to the Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Far East Asia section, Captain Dudley Knox, by U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, proposes bringing the United States into the war in Europe by provoking the Japanese to attack the United States.

1949 – The communist German Democratic Republic -East Germany -is formed from the division of control of Germany between the victorious allies.

1958 – Per a directive from President Eisenhower, Project Astronaut, the U.S. crewed spaceflight project is renamed Project Mercury. 

1963 – President Kennedy signs the ratification of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

1985 – 4 men from the Palestine Liberation Front hijack the MS Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt. 69 year old American, Leon Klinghoffer, is murdered by the hijackers and thrown overboard.

1996 – Fox News Channel begins broadcasting.

2001 – Less than a month after the al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S., the U.S. invades Afghanistan beginning with air strikes on Kabul,  Kandahar and Jalalabad.

2002 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis launches on STS-112 to continue assembly of the International Space Station.

2016 – Hurricane Matthew strikes the southeastern states at category 5 power, killing over 600 people and causing over $16 billion in damage.