Suicide bombers stage attacks in Bali

Year
2005
Month Day
October 01

On October 1, 2005, suicide bombers strike three restaurants in two tourist areas on the Indonesian island of Bali, a popular resort area. The bombings killed 22 people, including the bombers, and injured more than 50 others. This was the second suicide-bombing incident to rock the island in less than three years. (In 2002, a series of three bombs killed 202 people, many of them foreign nationals in Bali on vacation, including 88 Australians.)

The blasts occurred nearly simultaneously, hitting two outdoor restaurants in the Jimbaran beach resort and a third in Kuta, a tourist center about 19 miles away. The attacks, like those in 2002, were thought to be the work of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), an extremist Islamist militant group with links to al-Qaida. JI is also believed to be responsible for the bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta in 2003 that resulted in the deaths of 12 people and of the Australian embassy in Indonesia in 2004, in which 10 people died.

Though Indonesia is the most populous Muslim nation in the world, the island of Bali is mainly Hindu.

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Gunman opens fire on Las Vegas concert crowd, wounding hundreds and killing 58

Year
2017
Month Day
October 01

On the night of October 1, 2017, a gunman opens fire on a crowd attending the final night of a country music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring more than 800. Although the shooting only lasted 10 minutes, the death and injury tolls made this massacre the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at the time of the attack.

Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old retired man who lived in Mesquite, Nevada, targeted the crowd of concert-goers on the Las Vegas strip from the 32 floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel. He had checked into the hotel several days before the massacre.

Paddock began firing at the crowd at 10:05 p.m. using an arsenal of 23 guns, 12 of which were upgraded with bump stocks – a tool used to fire semi-automatic guns in rapid succession. Within the 10-minute period, he was able to fire more than 1,100 rounds of ammunition.

An open-door alert sent hotel security guard Jesus Campos to investigate the 32 floor at the start of the shooting. After arriving on the floor via the stairs, Campos couldn’t get past a barricade blocking the entrance so he used the elevator instead. While walking through the hall, he heard a drilling sound coming from Paddock’s room and was shot in the leg, through the door.

Once authorities were alerted, they arrived at Paddock’s suite at 10:17 p.m. and didn’t breach for nearly another hour at 11:20 p.m. Paddock was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His motives remain unknown.

In addition to the arsenal of weaponry found in Paddock’s hotel room, a note calculating how to attack the crowd based on trajectory and distance was also found. Authorities concluded that Paddock had no connections with terrorist groups such as ISIS and that his planned attack was carried out without accomplices.

The deadly shooting horrified the country and sparked debate over gun control legislation once again, with gun-control advocates claiming that Paddock’s use of bump stocks led to increased causalities. In response, some states banned bump stocks.

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Lawrence of Arabia captures Damascus

Year
1918
Month Day
October 01

A combined Arab and British force captures Damascus from the Turks during World War I, completing the liberation of Arabia. An instrumental commander in the Allied campaign was T.E. Lawrence, a legendary British soldier known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence, an Oxford-educated Arabist born in Tremadoc, Wales, began working for the British army as an intelligence officer in Egypt in 1914. He spent more than a year in Cairo, processing intelligence information. In 1916, he accompanied a British diplomat to Arabia, where Hussein ibn Ali, the emir of Mecca, had proclaimed a revolt against Turkish rule. Lawrence convinced his superiors to aid Hussein’s rebellion, and he was sent to join the Arabian army of Hussein’s son Faisal as a liaison officer.

Under Lawrence’s guidance, the Arabians launched an effective guerrilla war against the Turkish lines. He proved a gifted military strategist and was greatly admired by the Bedouin people of Arabia. In July 1917, Arabian forces captured Aqaba near the Sinai and joined the British march on Jerusalem. Lawrence was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In November, he was captured by the Turks while reconnoitering behind enemy lines in Arab dress and was tortured and sexually abused before escaping. He rejoined his army, which slowly worked its way north to Damascus. The Syrian capital fell on October 1, 1918.

Arabia was liberated, but Lawrence’s hope that the peninsula would be united as a single nation was dashed when Arabian factionalism came to the fore after Damascus. Lawrence, exhausted and disillusioned, left for England. Feeling that Britain had exacerbated the rivalries between the Arabian groups, he appeared before King George V and politely refused the medals offered to him.

After the war, he lobbied hard for independence for Arab countries and appeared at the Paris peace conference in Arab robes. He later wrote a monumental war memoir, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF) under an assumed name to escape his fame and acquire material for a new book. Discharged from the RAF in 1935, he was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident a few months later.

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Nazi war criminals sentenced at Nuremberg

Year
1946
Month Day
October 01

On October 1, 1946, 12 high-ranking Nazis are sentenced to death by the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg. Among those condemned to death by hanging were Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi minister of foreign affairs; Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo and chief of the German air force; and Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior. Seven others, including Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s former deputy, were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life. Three others were acquitted.

The trial, which had lasted nearly 10 months, was conducted by an international tribunal made up of representatives from the United States, the USSR, France, and Great Britain. It was the first trial of its kind in history, and the defendants faced charges ranging from crimes against peace to crimes of war and crimes against humanity. On October 16, 10 of the architects of Nazi policy were hanged one by one. Hermann Goering, who at sentencing was called the “leading war aggressor and creator of the oppressive program against the Jews,” committed suicide by poison on the eve of his scheduled execution. Nazi Party leader Martin Bormann was condemned to death in absentia; he is now known to have died in Berlin at the end of the war.

READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About the Nuremberg Trials

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Yosemite National Park established

On October 1, 1890, an act of Congress creates Yosemite National Park, home of such natural wonders as Half Dome and the giant sequoia trees. Environmental trailblazer John Muir (1838-1914) and his colleagues campaigned for the congressional action, which was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison and paved the way for generations of hikers, campers and nature lovers, along with countless “Don’t Feed the Bears” signs.

Native Americans were the main residents of the Yosemite Valley, located in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, until the 1849 gold rush brought thousands of non-Indian miners and settlers to the region. Tourists and damage to Yosemite Valley’s ecosystem followed. In 1864, to ward off further commercial exploitation, conservationists convinced President Abraham Lincoln to declare Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias a public trust of California. This marked the first time the U.S. government protected land for public enjoyment and it laid the foundation for the establishment of the national and state park systems. Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872.

READ MORE: 10 Facts About Yosemite National Park

In 1889, John Muir discovered that the vast meadows surrounding Yosemite Valley, which lacked government protection, were being overrun and destroyed by domestic sheep grazing. Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, a fellow environmentalist and influential magazine editor, lobbied for national park status for the large wilderness area around Yosemite Valley. On October 1 of the following year, Congress set aside over 1,500 square miles of land (about the size of Rhode Island) for what would become Yosemite National Park, America’s third national park. In 1906, the state-controlled Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove came under federal jurisdiction with the rest of the park.

Yosemite’s natural beauty is immortalized in the black-and-white landscape photographs of Ansel Adams (1902-1984), who at one point lived in the park and spent years photographing it. Today, over 3 million people get back to nature annually at Yosemite and check out such stunning landmarks as the 2,425-foot-high Yosemite Falls, one of the world’s tallest waterfalls; rock formations Half Dome and El Capitan, the largest granite monolith in the U.S.; and the three groves of giant sequoias, the world’s biggest trees.

READ MORE: The Early Environmentalists 

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Roger Maris breaks home-run record

Year
1961
Month Day
October 01

On October 1, 1961, New York Yankee Roger Maris becomes the first-ever major-league baseball player to hit more than 60 home runs in a single season. The great Babe Ruth set the record in 1927; Maris and his teammate Mickey Mantle spent 1961 trying to break it. After hitting 54 homers, Mantle injured his hip in September, leaving Maris to chase the record by himself. Finally, in the last game of the regular season, Maris hit his 61st home run against the Boston Red Sox. (The league-champion Yanks won the game 1-0.)

Maris hit his famous homer on his second at-bat of the day. On his first, he popped out to left field. When he came to the plate again in the fourth, his team had one out and the bases were empty. Maris let two pitches from Boston rookie Tracy Stallard go–one high and outside, one low and inside–before swinging hard at a waist-high fastball.

“An ear-splitting roar went up,” the New York Times reported, as “the crowd sensed that this was it.” The ball was gone, all right–Sal Durante, a 19-year-old Brooklyn truck driver, caught it about 10 rows back in the right-field stands. Maris trotted around the bases, stopping to shake hands with a young boy who’d managed to wriggle past security and onto the field and stepped on home plate. Then he tipped his cap to the crowd, took four bows and returned to his seat on the bench.

He’d hit 61 homers, but his new record wasn’t official. In July, baseball commissioner Ford Frick had announced that he wouldn’t consider Ruth’s record broken unless the player who broke it had hit more than 60 home runs in fewer than 154 games–the number of games Ruth’s Yankees had played in the 1927 season. (By 1961, teams played 162 regular-season games.) Frick had more than a passing interest in the issue: He’d been a good friend of the Babe’s and thought it was his responsibility to guard his legacy as closely as possible. Moreover, he resented the changes he saw in baseball–bulky sluggers, shorter fences, longer seasons, livelier balls. And Frick, like many fans, didn’t quite know what to make of Maris, a Midwesterner of few words who once told a reporter “I was born surly, and I’m going to stay that way.” The ever-disdainful Rogers Hornsby summed up the feelings of many Ruth partisans and Mantle fans when he told anyone who would listen that the young Yankee “has no right to break Ruth’s record.”

And so, as far as Major League Baseball was concerned, he didn’t. While there was never an official asterisk next to any record of Maris’–in fact, the league didn’t even have its own record book until 1995, and of course Frick had no real say over what anybody else put in their record books–the league simply considered Ruth’s and Maris’ to be two separate accomplishments. In 1991, an MLB committee on historical accuracy voted to remove the distinction and award the record fully to Maris, who had died of cancer six years earlier.

In 1998, Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs both broke Maris’ home-run record. Sosa finished the season with 66 and McGwire finished with 70. Barry Bonds now holds the record with 73.

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Jimmy Carter is born

Year
1924
Month Day
October 01

On October 1, 1924, future President James Earl Carter is born in Plains, Georgia. Carter, who preferred to be called “Jimmy,” was the son of a peanut farmer and was the first president to be born in a hospital. Carter was raised a devoted Southern Baptist and graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1946. He married Rosalynn Smith later that year.

After graduation, Carter served in the Navy’s new nuclear submarine program and was looking forward to a career in the Navy when his father passed away in 1953. The Carters dutifully returned to Georgia and took over the family farm. Back in Plains, Carter became involved in local politics, serving first on the school board and working his way up to a seat on the George State Planning Commission. In 1962, he was elected to the George Senate and, nine years later, he became governor.

A liberal Democrat, Carter launched a campaign against Republican presidential incumbent Gerald Ford in 1974, when the American electorate was still reeling from the Vietnam War, which ended in 1973, and former President Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. Ford, who assumed office immediately upon Nixon’s resignation in 1974, pardoned his former boss, enraging many who thought Nixon should have had to stand trial. Carter’s “Washington outsider” persona helped him win the White House in 1976.

READ MORE: How Jimmy Carter Brokered a Hard-Won Peace Deal Between Israel and Egypt

Carter’s tenure as president was most notable for his alternative-energy policies, racial-equality programs and friendly overtures toward Russia. He was instrumental in brokering a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and signed an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet Union (SALT II). These triumphs, however, were overshadowed by his inability to lead the nation out of a crippling energy crunch caused by the OPEC oil embargo of 1973.

On top of his administration’s failure to effectively combat the energy crisis, which in turn contributed to rapidly rising inflation, Carter’s administration was forced to deal with another crisis. In 1979, an Islamist student group in Iran stormed the U.S. embassy in Teheran, holding 70 Americans hostage for 444 days. Carter’s failure to secure the release of the hostages, the ongoing recession and a growing movement toward conservatism in America contributed to Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential campaign.

READ MORE: How the Iran Hostage Crisis Became a 14-Month Nightmare for President Carter and the Nation

The Carters have since stayed active in national and international affairs. In 1982, they founded the Carter Center in Atlanta to advocate for human rights and to alleviate “unnecessary human suffering” around the world. Since 1984, the Carters have given their time each year to build homes and raise awareness of homelessness with the international charitable organization Habitat for Humanity. In 2002, Carter won the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter live in Plains, Georgia.

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Scientific American reports that radio will soon be used to transmit music to the home

Year
1920
Month Day
October 01

In an 1888 novel called Looking Backward: 2000-1887, author Edward Bellamy imagined a scene in which a time-traveler from 1887 reacts to a technological advance from the early 21st century that he describes as, “An arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will.” In Bellamy’s imagination, this astonishing feat was accomplished by a vast network of wires connecting individual homes with centrally located concert halls staffed round-the-clock with live performers. As it turned out, this vision of the year 2000 would come to pass far sooner than Bellamy imagined, and without all the pesky wires. On October 1, 1920, Scientific American magazine reported that the rapidly developing medium of radio would soon be used to broadcast music. A revolution in the role of music in everyday life was about to be born.

“It has been well known for some years that by placing a form of telephone transmitter in a concert hall or at any point where music is being played the sound may be carried over telephone wires to an ordinary telephone receiver at a distant point,” began the bulletin in the October 1, 1920 issue of the popular science monthly, “but it is only recently that a method of transmitting music by radio has been found possible.”

Arguments about radio’s origins persist to this day, but its basic workings had been understood for upwards of 20 years at the time of this announcement. It was only in the years immediately following World War I, however, that radio made the transition from scientific curiosity to practical technology. By late 1919, experiments had begun in Britain, the United States and elsewhere that would lead to the breakthrough use of radio not just as a replacement for the telegraph, but as a communications and entertainment medium.

Some of those experiments were taking place in the laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., where station WWV was established to test various means of radio transmission. Relying significantly on amateur radio operators in the local area for feedback on its experiments, the Bureau began successfully testing the transmission of music in late 1919 and early 1920. It was those experiments that led to the public announcement in Scientific American.

“Music can be performed at any place, radiated into the air through an ordinary radio transmitting set and received at any other place, even though hundreds of miles away,” the report continued, noting that “the music received can be made as loud as desired by suitable operation of the receiving apparatus.” “Experimental concerts are at present being conducted every Friday evening from 8:30 to 11:00 by the Radio Laboratory of the Bureau of Standards….The possibilities of such centralized radio concerts are great and extremely interesting.”

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Johnny Carson makes debut as “Tonight Show” host

Year
1962
Month Day
October 01

On October 1, 1962, Johnny Carson takes over from Jack Paar as host of the late-night talk program The Tonight Show. Carson went on to host The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for three decades, becoming one of the biggest figures in entertainment in the 20th century.

John William Carson was born on October 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa. He grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska, served in the U.S. Navy in the mid-1940s and attended the University of Nebraska. By the early 1950s, he was living in California and working in radio and the emerging medium of television. He later moved to New York City and in 1957 became the host of the popular game show Who Do You Trust? In 1958, Carson appeared on The Tonight Show as a substitute for host Jack Paar. The Tonight Show had originated in 1951 in Los Angeles as a radio program hosted by Steve Allen. In 1954, the program moved to TV and in 1956, Jack Parr replaced Allen as the host. Carson took over permanent hosting duties from Parr on October 1, 1962. He hosted the show from New York City until 1972, when it relocated to Burbank, California.

Each edition of The Tonight Show began with Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon announcing “Heeere’s Johnny!” Carson, who became known for his relaxed, affable stage presence and dapper appearance, performed an opening monologue of jokes, punctuated by his trademark golf swing. Following the monologue, he would banter with McMahon and the show’s bandleader Doc Severinsen and sometimes perform skits and play characters such as Carnac the Magnificent, an “all-knowing seer,” and the elderly Aunt Blabby. Carson then conducted celebrity interviews. The Tonight Show featured sit-downs with the day’s biggest movie and TV stars, as well as athletes, politicians, singers, comedians and animal acts. On December 17, 1969, The Tonight Show drew its largest audience when some 58 million people tuned in for the on-air wedding of the diminutive singer Tiny Tim to a teenage fan known as Miss Vicki.

As for Carson’s influence on the TV industry as a whole, according to his obituary in the New York Times: “Throughout his career, Mr. Carson was instrumental in changing some of the bedrock ways television operated. His move to Burbank meant a realignment of American pop culture from East Coast to West Coast, from Broadway to Hollywood. And once the ‘Tonight’ show ceased to be televised live from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. and began being taped in the early evening, it lost some of the spontaneity and sense of danger that live performance brings (and also, eventually, a half-hour of its running time). The practice of taping is now the norm, and virtually all live entertainment programming on national television has become a thing of the past.”

After three decades with the hugely successful Tonight Show, Carson decided to retire. He hosted his final show on May 22, 1992. Comedian Jay Leno took over hosting duties the following day. Carson, who was married four times, stayed largely out of the public spotlight after retiring. On January 23, 2005, the late-night TV legend died at the age of 79 of complications from emphysema.

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Earthquake rocks Southern California

Year
1987
Month Day
October 01

An earthquake in Whittier, California, kills 6 people and injures 100 more on October 1, 1987. The quake was the largest to hit Southern California since 1971, but not nearly as damaging as the Northridge quake that would devastate parts of Los Angeles seven years later.

Whittier is a small town south of Los Angeles best known as President Richard Nixon’s hometown. At 7:42 a.m. on October 1, a 6.1-magnitude earthquake jolted Whittier and the surrounding area for a full 30 seconds, violently shaking people out of their beds and causing unsecured items to crash to the floors in homes throughout the region. Several fires were ignited when gas lines were severed by the earth’s movement. Falling debris killed six people and the earthquake caused the area’s major highways to be shut down. Despite the strong tremors, there were no major building collapses.

A long series of aftershocks rocked Southern California for days after the earthquake. Reluctant to return to their homes, hundreds of people camped out in public parks for several days. Meanwhile, hospitals were evacuated as a precaution. Some looting was reported during the chaos, but it was not a widespread problem.

It is estimated that the Whittier earthquake caused $100 million in damages.

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