Today in History — October 24

1147 – Crusaders led by Afonso Henriquez, Count of Portugal, retake Lisbon from the Moors after a four-month siege.  Afonso will later be named the first King of Portugal.

1648 – The Peace of Westphalia is signed, marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War and creating the basis for the modern relationships among nation-states..

1852 – Daniel Webster dies at age 70 at Marshfield, Massachusetts.

1855 – Future lawyer, businessman, and U.S. Vice President James Schoolcraft “Sunny Jim” Sherman is born at Utica, New York.

1857 – Sheffield F.C., the world’s first football (soccer) club, is founded, coincidentally enough, in Sheffield, England.

1861 – A consortium of companies led by Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line across the United States. The Pony Express goes out of business two days later.

1901 – Sixty-three year-old Annie Edson Taylor – looking for a good way to pay for her upcoming retirement –becomes the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

1917 – An armed Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) triggers the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia.  The October date is “Old Style”; in the West the revolution will start on November 7. 

1929 – In what comes to be called “Black Thursday,” the New York Stock Exchange plunges amid massive volume.  By the end of the following week the markets will be devastated.

FGS