October 14, 1979: Pope John Paul II became the first pope to visit the White House.

October 15, 1990: Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, receives Nobel Peace Prize for his work in making his country more open and reducing Cold War tensions.

October 16, 1701: Yale University is founded as the Collegiate School of Killingworth, Connecticut by Congregationalists who consider Harvard too liberal.

October 17, 1244: The Sixth Crusade ends when an Egyptian-Khwarezmian force almost annihilates the Frankish army at Gaza.

October 18, 1883: The weather station at the top of Ben Nevis, Scotland, the highest mountain in Britain, is declared open. Weather stations were set up on the tops of mountains all over Europe and the Eastern United States in order to gather information for new weather forecasts.

October 19, 1917: The first doughnut is fried by Salvation Army volunteer women for American troops in France during World War I.

October 20, 1935: Mao Zedong's 6,000 mile "Long March" ended as his Communist forces arrived at Yanan, in northwest China, almost a year after fleeing Chiang Kai-shek's armies in the south.