439The Vandals take Carthage
On 19 October 439 Gaiseric, king of the Vandals, took Carthage and threw off the arrangement under which he had nominally held North Africa on Rome’s behalf. He made the city his capital. His people - some 80,000 of them, by the figure the sources give - had crossed from Spain into Africa ten years earlier and had met very little that could stop them.
It was a heavier blow than the size of the army suggests. Roman Africa was the western empire’s granary and one of its richest tax provinces, and Carthage was its second city. With it Gaiseric acquired a fleet, and with the fleet the western Mediterranean; in 455 he sacked Rome itself. Rome recognised the Vandal kingdom by treaty in 442. Byzantium did not take Africa back for nearly a century.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Gaiseric ↗
1781Cornwallis gives up at Yorktown
Lord Cornwallis had taken his army onto a peninsula in Virginia to wait for the Royal Navy. The navy did not come: Admiral de Grasse’s French fleet held the mouth of the Chesapeake, and about 17,000 American and French troops under Washington and Rochambeau dug siege lines around the town. After three weeks of bombardment, Cornwallis surrendered some 8,000 men on 19 October 1781.
Washington refused the traditional honours of war, because the British had refused them to the Americans at Charleston the year before, so the defeated army marched out with its colours cased. Cornwallis pleaded illness and sent his second-in-command. Fighting dragged on elsewhere for two more years, but Yorktown effectively ended the war in North America, and the Treaty of Paris followed in 1783.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Siege of Yorktown ↗
1812Napoleon turns back from Moscow
Napoleon had held Moscow for a month, in a city largely burnt and empty, waiting for a Russian offer of terms that never came. Wintering there was impossible and politically dangerous. On 19 October 1812 the Grande Armée - by then about 110,000 men - marched out and began to go home.
He intended to take a southern route through country his army had not already stripped, but Kutuzov blocked him at Maloyaroslavets on 24 October and he turned back onto the road he had come by. What followed is one of the worst military catastrophes on record: hunger, typhus, Cossack raids, the crossing of the Berezina and an early, brutal winter. Of roughly 600,000 men who had entered Russia in June, something like 112,000 came out.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Napoleonic Wars, the retreat from Moscow ↗
1954Britain agrees to leave the Suez Canal zone
On 19 October 1954 Egypt and the United Kingdom signed an agreement in Cairo that replaced the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 and set a timetable for withdrawing British forces from the Suez Canal base. It was the end, on paper, of seventy-two years of British military presence in Egypt. The last troops left in June 1956.
Egyptian nationalists were divided on it: the agreement allowed for British forces to return if the canal zone were attacked, which to some looked like the old arrangement in new clothes. The Muslim Brotherhood attacked it, and an attempt on Nasser’s life that October gave him the occasion to break the movement. Two months after the last British soldier left, Nasser nationalised the canal company, and Britain came back at the end of the year - briefly, and with results nobody in 1954 had planned for.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Anglo-Egyptian Agreement ↗
1987The worst day in the history of the stock market
On Monday 19 October 1987 the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points - 22.6 per cent - in a single session. It is still the largest one-day fall the index has ever recorded, and it wiped out something like 500 billion dollars. Nothing obvious had happened: no war, no bank failure, no default.
What there was instead was a new kind of machinery. Portfolio insurance programmes were designed to sell automatically as prices fell, which made prices fall further, which triggered more selling. The panic went round the world in hours: Australia lost more than 40 per cent, New Zealand nearly two-thirds from its peak. The Federal Reserve said publicly that it would supply whatever liquidity was needed, and the American market recovered about 60 per cent of the loss within two sessions. The Dow ended 1987 slightly up on the year.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Federal Reserve History: stock market crash of 1987 ↗
