Named foreign minister of Austria this day in 1809 was the prince von Metternich, who revived Austria's standing in European affairs and whose organization of the Congress of Vienna maintained a balance of power in Europe.
| 2001: | | In Italy's worst civilian air disaster in nearly 30 years, a Cessna took a wrong turn on a taxiway at Linate Airport in Milan and crashed into an SAS airliner about to take off, which exploded, killing 118 people, including 4 airport workers. |
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| 1970: | | | Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. |
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| 1967: | | | A prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution and a South American guerrilla leader, Che Guevara was captured and later shot to death by a Bolivian army. |
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| 1957: | | An accident at the Windscale nuclear facility in northwestern England caused a fire that burned for 16 hours and left 10 tons of radioactive fuel melted in the reactor core. |
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| 1918: | | Corporal Alvin Cullum York single-handedly captured 132 Germans and killed another 25 during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I. |
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| 1871: | | The city of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, burned to the ground in hours, killing 1,152 people. At the same time, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed 4 square miles (10 square km) of Chicago, killing 250 and leaving 90,000 homeless. |
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| 1604: | | Jan Brunowski, Johannes Kepler's assistant, was the first to observe Kepler's nova. |
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