On October 18, 1775, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley was freed from slavery, upon the death of her master. Widely appreciated in her day, she was the first African-American to publish a book.
On October 17, 1933, Albert Einstein fled Nazi Germany for the United States.
On October 16, 1781, George Washington captured Yorktown, Virginia, after the Siege of Yorktown.
October 16 is a traditional date to award Nobel Peace Prizes, good (Desmond Tutu, 1984), and bad (Henry Kissinger, 1973). Two Nobel laureates were born on October 16, as well: Austen Chamberlain, English statesman, saw daylight first in 1863; Eugene O’Neill, American playwright and Nobel Laureate for Literature, made his debut in 1888.
On October 15, 1894, Alfred Dreyfus (1859 – 1935) was arrested for spying: The Dreyfus Affair began. And thus began a scandal that brought anti-Semitism into the cultural limelight.
On October 14, 1644, Willliam Penn was born. An English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania (the English North American colony and future Commonwealth of Pennsylvania), he was an early champion of democracy and religious freedom, notable for his good relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Indians. Penn died in 1718.
On October 13, 1870, American social critic and education theorist Albert Jay Nock was born. Nock was the author of a number of books, including Jefferson, the Man and Our Enemy, The State, but was probably most famous for his intellectual autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which was widely read and admired amongst conservatives in the 1950s and ’60s.
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas, thinking he had reached India.
Exactly two hundred years later, a letter from Massachusetts Governor William Phips ended the Salem Witch Trials.
On this date in 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance was first recited by students in many U.S. public schools, as part of a celebration marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage.
The Pledge had been composed that year by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist minister, and was first published in Youth’s Companion magazine, the issue dated September 8, 1892. The recital was accompanied with a salute to the flag known as the Bellamy salute. During World War II, the salute was replaced with a hand-over-heart gesture because the original form (described in detail by Bellamy) involved stretching the arm out towards the flag in a manner that resembled the later Nazi salute. The original form of the Pledge was somewhat less involved than later versions:
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
In October an editorial addition occurred, the word “to” prefixing “the republic.”
October 11, 1890, marks the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
On the same date in 1976, President Gerald R. Ford approved a congressional joint resolution Public Law 94-479 to appoint, posthumously, George Washington to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, as part of the bicentennial celebrations.
John J. Pershing is the only other American to attain this high title, and the only one to achieve it while alive.
On October 10, 1973, Austrian-born American economist, Ludwig von Mises (pictured above) died.
Two-hundred fifty-nine years earlier, the French law-maker and Jansenist Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert died.
Both economists were known for their defenses of freer markets: le Pesant for pioneering the critique of mercantilism, arguing that a nation’s wealth consisted in what its people produce and trade; Mises for systematizing economic theory and advancing the critique of both socialism and latter-day mercantilism (what he called “interventionism”).
Sixty-o e years ago, on October 10, 1957, Ayn Rand’s dystopian/utopian novel Atlas Shrugged was published. Written to expound and defend a specifically individualist, freedom/free-market point of view, it is surely one of the most influential and literarily successful didactic novels ever written.
On October 9, 1635, Protestant theologian Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a religious dissident after he spoke out against punishments for religious offenses and giving away Native American land. He moved south, founding Providence Plantations, where he worked for separation of church and state, the rights of aboriginal Americans, and against slavery.