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October 28

456 – The Visigoths brutally sack the Suebi's capital of Braga (Portugal), and the town's churches are burnt to the ground.

1492 – Christopher Columbus lands in Cuba on his first voyage to the New World.

1538 – The first university in the New World (in present-day Dominican Republic), the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino, is established.

1636 – A vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony establishes the first college in what would become the United States, today known as Harvard University.

1775 – American Revolutionary War: A British proclamation forbids residents from leaving Boston.

1886 – In New York Harbor, President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty. The first ticker tape parade takes place in New York City when office workers spontaneously throw ticker tape into the streets as the statue is dedicated.

1891 – The Mino–Owari earthquake, the largest inland earthquake in Japan's history, strikes Gifu Prefecture.

1893 – Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Pathétique, receives its première performance in St. Petersburg, only nine days before the composer's death.

1919 – The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January.

1922 – Italian fascists led by Benito Mussolini march on Rome and take over the Italian government.

1929 – Black Monday, a day in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which also saw major stock market upheaval.

1942 – The Alaska Highway (Alcan Highway) is completed through Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska.

1948 – Swiss chemist Paul Müller is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the insecticidal properties of DDT.

1956 – Elvis Presley receives a polio vaccination on national TV. This single event is credited with raising immunization levels in the United States from 0.6% to over 80% in just six months.

1962 – End of Cuban Missile Crisis: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.

1965 – Nostra aetate, the "Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions" of the Second Vatican Council, is promulgated by Pope Paul VI; it absolves the Jews of responsibility for the death of Jesus, reversing Innocent III's 760-year-old declaration.

1971 – Britain launches the satellite Prospero into low Earth orbit atop a Black Arrow carrier rocket from Launch Area 5B at Woomera, South Australia, the only British satellite to date launched by a British rocket.

2005 – Plame affair: Lewis Libby, Vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is indicted in the Valerie Plame case. Libby resigns later that day.

2006 – The funeral service takes place for those executed at Bykivnia forest, outside Kiev, Ukraine. Eight hundred seventeen Ukrainian civilians (out of some 100,000) executed by Bolsheviks at Bykivnia in 1930s/1940s are reburied.

2014 – An unmanned Antares rocket carrying NASA's Cygnus CRS Orb-3 resupply mission to the International Space Station explodes seconds after taking off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia.

Births

1793 – Eliphalet Remington; 1864 – Adolfo Camarillo; 1897 – Edith Head; 1902 – Elsa Lanchester; 1903 – Evelyn Waugh; 1909 – Francis Bacon; 1914 – Jonas Salk; 1917 – Jack Soo; 1926 – Bowie Kuhn; 1929 – Joan Plowright; 1930 – Bernie Ecclestone; 1936 – Charlie Daniels; 1939 – Jane Alexander; 1941 – Hank Marvin; 1944 – Dennis Franz; 1948 – Telma Hopkins; 1952 – Annie Potts; 1955 – Bill Gate$; 1956 – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; 1962 – Daphne Zuniga; 1963 – Lauren Holly; 1963 – Sheryl Underwood; 1965 – Jami Gertz; 1966 – Matt Drudge; 1966 – Andy Richter; 1967 – Julia Roberts; 1969 – Ben Harper; 1972 – Brad Paisley; 1974 – Joaquin Phoenix; 1978 – Justin Guarini; 1987 – Frank Ocean

Deaths

1704 – John Locke; 1970 – Baby Huey; 1998 – Ted Hughes; 2006 – Red Auerbach; 2006 – Trevor Berbick; 2007 – Porter Wagoner