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October 16 in History

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The Cobbler in the Captain Coat

October 16, 1906

The Cobbler in the Captain Coat

On a crisp autumn afternoon in nineteen hundred and six, an aging ex-convict in a secondhand Prussian uniform commandeered a squad of soldiers and seized an entire town hall without firing a shot. The heist exposed the absurd obedience at the heart of imperial Germany and turned a penniless cobbler into a global folk hero.

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Also on this day

More that happened on October 16

Pick any event and Historai will make it an episode.

  1. 1384Eleven-year-old Jadwiga was crowned monarch of Poland in Krakow, reigning as king rather than queen regnant under Polish law.
  2. 1555English Protestant bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned at the stake for heresy in Oxford under Queen Mary I.
  3. 1793Deposed Queen Marie Antoinette was executed by guillotine at the Place de la Revolution during the height of the French Revolution.
  4. 1834A devastating fire consumed most of the Palace of Westminster in London, destroying both parliamentary chambers and medieval government structures.
  5. 1846Dentist William Thomas Green Morton publicly demonstrated surgical anesthesia with ether during a tumor removal at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
  6. 1859Abolitionist John Brown and twenty-one followers attacked the federal armory at Harpers Ferry to ignite a massive armed rebellion against slavery.
  7. 1934Mao Zedong led thousands of Chinese Communist troops out of Jiangxi province to begin the grueling trek known as the Long March.
  8. 1946Ten prominent Nazi leaders convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity were hanged inside a gymnasium at Nuremberg Prison.
  9. 1964China detonated its first atomic bomb at the Lop Nur test site, becoming the fifth nation with operational nuclear weapons.
  10. 1968American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the Black Power salute atop the Olympic medal podium in Mexico City.
  11. 1978Cardinals gathered in Rome elected Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church's first non-Italian pontiff in centuries.
  12. 1995Hundreds of thousands of African American men gathered on the National Mall in Washington for a national day of unity and atonement.

Chosen from the October 16 pages of HISTORY, HistoryNet and OnThisDay.com, retold in our own words.