On October 31
On October 31, the Human Saga records one pivotal event: Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses and the start of the Reformation (1517).
On this day
On 31 October 1517 the Augustinian friar and theology professor Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-five Theses at Wittenberg, attacking the sale of indulgences and questioning papal authority over salvation.
Also this week in history (Oct 28 – Nov 3)
On 28 October 312 CE Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, where Maxentius drowned in the Tiber; the victory left Constantine master of the western empire.
On the morning of Saturday, 1 November 1755, the Feast of All Saints, a massive earthquake estimated at magnitude 7.7 or greater struck off the coast of Portugal, with its epicentre in the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Cape St. Vincent.
On 2 November 1834 the ship Atlas reached Mauritius from Calcutta carrying thirty-six Indian labourers, the pioneer cohort of what became the modern indentured labour system.
On 3 November 1839 the young Sultan Abdülmecid I proclaimed the Hatt-i Sharif of Gülhane (the Noble Edict of the Rose Garden), opening the Tanzimat or 'Reorganisation' era of the Ottoman Empire.
On 2 November 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, for transmission to the Zionist Federation, stating that the British government viewed 'with favour the establishment in Palestine of a…
On 2 November 1920, Westinghouse station KDKA in Pittsburgh transmitted returns from the Harding-Cox presidential election, an event widely cited as the first scheduled broadcast by a licensed commercial radio station.
In late October 1922 tens of thousands of Fascist Blackshirts converged on the Italian capital in a coordinated show of force orchestrated by Benito Mussolini and the National Fascist Party.
Following Ottoman defeat in World War I and the Turkish War of Independence, recognition of the Ankara government at the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923) cleared the way for the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923…
On 2 November 1936 the British Broadcasting Corporation began the world's first regular, public, high-definition television service from studios at Alexandra Palace in north London.
The Algerian War began on 1 November 1954, when fighters of the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched coordinated attacks across French Algeria in the 'Toussaint Rouge', and ended with Algerian independence on 5 July 1962.
On 29 October 1969 the first message was transmitted over the ARPANET, an experimental packet-switched computer network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The generative-AI boom became a dominant force in global markets in the mid-2020s, concentrating trillions of dollars of value in a handful of technology firms.
On 29 October 1945, only months after the end of the war in Europe, Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a public lecture titled "Existentialism Is a Humanism" at the Club Maintenant in Paris.