October 14 is the 287th day of the year (288th in leap years). There are 79 days remaining until the end of the year. (Photograph: Theodore Roosevelt giving a stump speech.)

On This Day in History

• William the Conqueror defeats King Harold II of England at the Battle of Hastings (1066)
• Robert the Bruce defeats King Edward II of England and forces him to accept Scottish independence (1322)
• This day does not exist in Italy, Poland, Portugal, or Spain because of the introduction of the Gregorian calendar (1582)
• Mary Queen of Scots goes on trial for conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth I of England (1586)
• George Eastman patents paper-strip photographic film (1884)
• The Chicago Cubs win their last World Series (1908)
• Theodore Roosevelt is shot in the chest, but gives his scheduled public speech before getting treated for the wound (1912)
• A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh is published (1926)
• Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor extermination camp revolt, killing 11 SS guards, and about 300 (of 600) prisoners escape (1943)
• Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis (1947)
• The Cuban Missile Crisis begins when a U2 overflight of Cuba discovers Soviet missile installations (1962)
• Леони́д Бре́жнев (Leonid Brezhnev) becomes General Secretary of the USSR Communist Party (1964)
• The crew of Apollo 7 gives the first live TV broadcast by American astronauts in orbit (1968*)
• The UK introduces the 50p coin to replace the ten-shilling note (1969)
• Ronald Reagan proclaims a War on Drugs (1982)
• ياسر عرفات‎ (Yasser Arafat), יִצְחָק רַבִּין (Yitzhak Rabin), and שמעון פרס (Shimon Peres) receive the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords (1994)

*For why I own an Apollo 7 spacesuit, see “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.”

Birthdays

• Akbar the Great, Mughal emperor (1542)
• James II and VII, deposed English monarch (1633 O.S.**)
• William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania (1644)
• Joe Start, baseball player (1842)
• Éamon de Valera, president of Ireland (1882)
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th US president (1890)
• Lillian Gish, actress (1893)
• Lois Lenski, children’s author (1893)
• e. e. cummings, poet (1894)
• W. Edwards Deming, quality guru (1900)
• Hannah Arendt, political philosopher (1906)
• John Wooden, basketball player and coach (1910)
• Lê Đức Thọ, North Vietnamese leader (1911)
• C. Everett Koop, US surgeon general (1916)
• Roger Moore, actor (1927)
• Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire leader (1930)
• John Dean, White House counsel (1938***)
• Ralph Lauren, fashion designer (1939)
• Craig Ventner, human genome sequencer (1946)
• Harry Anderson, actor and magician (1952)
• Greg Evigan, actor (1953)
• Beth Daniel, golfer (1956)
• Jennell Jaquays, game designer (1956)
• Thomas Dolby, singer-songwriter (1958)
• Isaac Mizrahi, fashion designer (1961)
• Lori Petty, actress (1963)
• Usher, singer-songwriter (1978)
• Baby Fae, received a baboon heart transplant (1984)
• LaRon Landry, football player (1984)

**O. S. = Old Style. England changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, meaning that James II and VII was born under the Julian calendar and died under the Gregorian one.

***John Dean is the subject of a long piece in my book Watergate Considered as an Org Chart of Semi-Precious Stones.

Deaths

• Harold II, last Anglo-Saxon English monarch (1066)
• Thomas Harrison, regicide (1660)
• John Marshall Harlan, Supreme Court justice (1911)
• Erwin Rommel, German field marshal (1944****)
• Errol Flynn, actor (1959)
• Randall Jarrell, poet (1965)
• Bing Crosby, singer and actor (1977)
• Keenan Wynn, actor (1986)
• Leonard Bernstein, conductor and composer (1990)
• Harold Robbins, author (1997)
• Cleveland Amory, critic (1998)
• Freddy Fender, singer-songwriter (2006)
• Lou Albano, wrestler (2009)
• Benoit Mandelbrot, mathematician (2010)
• Arlen Specter, politician (2012)

****Erwin Rommel is a major character in my novels Fox on the Rhine and Fox at the Front (both with Douglas Niles).

Holidays

• Chocolate-Covered Insects Day (informal)
• Day of Formation of the Tajik Repubic (Tajikistan)
• Day of the Cathedral of Living Pillar (Georgian Orthodox Church)
• Feast of Angadrisma (Catholicism)
• Frump Day (informal)
• lower case day (celebrating the birth of e. e. cummings)
• Mother’s Day (Belarus)
• Nada no Kenka Matsuri (Roughhouse Festival or Fighting Festival) (Shirahama, Japan)
• National Dessert Day (US)
• National Education Day (Poland)
• Nyerere Day (Tanzania)
• October Revolution Day (Yemen)
• World Standards Day (International)