Today in History in 1973 President Richard Nixon rejects an Appeals Court demand to turn over the Watergate tapes.

The On This Day In History archives at “Simple English Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia” contains over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few of them:

October 19 is the 292nd day of the year (293rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 73 days remaining until the end of the year.

EVENTS

202 BC – The Battle of Zama results in the defeat of Carthage and Hannibal.

AD 439 – The Vandals, led by King Gaiseric, take Carthage in North Africa.

1216 - King John of England dies. His nine-year-old son takes to the throne, becoming King Henry III of England.

1303 - Siegen, in Westphalia (in present-day Germany) is given city rights.

1386 - First lecture at the University of Heidelberg.

1453 – The French recapture of Bordeaux brings the Hundred Years' War to a close, with the English retaining only Calais on French soil.

1466 – The Thirteen Years' War ended with the Second Treaty of Toruń. Gdansk Pomerania and Prussia as a whole was incorporated into Poland; the Teutonic Knights were allowed to rule its eastern part as Polish vassals.

1781 – Major General Lord Charles Cornwallis surrenders to George Washington and Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown, Virginia, ending the American Revolutionary War.

1789 - John Jay is sworn in as the first Chief Justice of the United States.

1805 - Battle of Ulm in the Napoleonic Wars.

1812 – Napoleon I of France retreats from Moscow.

1813 – The Battle of Leipzig concludes, giving Napoleon Bonaparte one of his worst defeats.

1845 - Opera Tannhäuser by Richar Wagner is first performed.

1864 – Battle of Cedar Creek – Union Army under Philip Sheridan destroys Confederate Army under Jubal Early.

1864 – Confederate raiders launch an attack on Saint Albans, Vermont from Canada.

1866 - Austria hands over Veneto to France, which immediately gives it to Italy. Mantua also becomes part of Italy.

1873 – Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers universities draft the first code of American football rules.

1912 – Italy takes possession of Tripoli, Libya from the Ottoman Empire.

1914 – The First Battle of Ypres begins.

1917 – Love Field in Dallas, Texas is opened.

1921 - Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Joaquim Granjo is killed in a coup.

1933 – Germany withdraws from the League of Nations.

1935 – Fascist Italy invades Ethiopia.

1943 – Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, is isolated by researchers at Rutgers University.

1944 – United States forces land in the Philippines.

1950 – The People's Republic of China joins the Korean War.

1954 – First successful climb of Cho Oyu in the Himalayas.

1956 - The Soviet Union and Japan sign a joint declaration, officially ending the state of war between them.

1973 – President Richard Nixon rejects an Appeals Court demand to turn over the Watergate tapes.

1973 - Heavy rain causes floods in south-eastern Spain, killing around 200 people.

1974 – Niue becomes a self-governing territory of New Zealand.

1982 – John De Lorean is arrested for trafficking in cocaine.

1983 – Maurice Bishop, Prime Minister of Grenada, is overthrown and executed in a military coup d'état led by Bernard Coard.

1985 – The first Blockbuster Video store opens in Dallas, Texas.

1986 – Samora Machel, President of Mozambique and a prominent leader of FRELIMO, and 33 others died when their Tupolev 134 plane crashed into the Lebombo Mountains.

1987 – In retaliation for Iranian attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy disables three of Iran's offshore oil platforms.

1987 – (Black Monday) Dow Jones Industrial Average falls by 22%.

1989 – Guildford Four convictions are quashed by the Court of Appeal – they had spent 15 years in prison through a miscarriage of justice.

1991 - An earthquake in northern India, of magnitude 7, kills 2,000 people.

1992 - German politicians Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian are found dead. It is believed that Bastian killed Kelly on October 1, before killing himself.

1994 – New Zealand's Goodnight Kiwi says good night for the last time.

2001 – SIEV-X sinks en route to Christmas Island

2003 – Mother Teresa is beatified by Pope John Paul II.

2004 – Myanmar prime minister Khin Nyunt is ousted and placed under house arrest by the Thai government on charges of corruption.

2005 – The trial of Saddam Hussein, on charges of Crimes against Humanity, begins.

2005 – Hurricane Wilma becomes the most intense Atlantic hurricane on record.

2007 - A bomb explosion occurs at a market in Makati, Philippines, killing 11 people.

2008 - In the US, former Republican United States Secretary of State Colin Powell announces that he intends to vote for Democrat candidate Barack Obama over John McCain in the November 4 Presidential election.

2012 - A bomb attack in Beirut, Lebanon, kills at least 11 people, including the Lebanese army chief. The attack is believed to be linked to the conflict in Syria.

2015 - The Liberal Party of Canada wins an overall majority in Canada's general election, ending over nine years of Stephen Harper's Conservative government. Justin Trudeau is the designated Prime Minister of Canada.

2017 - A stick-shaped object called 'Oumuamua is discovered as it passes through the Solar System.

2018 - A train runs over a crowd celebrating a Hindu festival in Amritsar, India, killing at least 60 people.

2018 - Unmanned European-Japanese spacecraft BepiColombo is launched on a seven-year journey to the planet Mercury.

2018 - Saudi Arabia admits that the missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi died in its consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

2019 - A dam collapses at a gold mine on the Seiba river in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, Russia, killing 15 people.

2019 - The House of Commons of the United Kingdom holds a Saturday sitting for the first time since 1982 because of the issue of Brexit.