28 October History
- 312 - Constantine the Great defeats Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maxentius at the Mulvian Bridge.
- 969 - After a prolonged siege, the Byzantines end 300 years of Arab rule in Antioch.
- 1216 - Henry III of England is crowned.
- 1628 - After a fifteen-month siege, the Huguenot town of La Rochelle surrenders to royal forces.
- 1636 - Harvard College, the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, is founded in Cambridge, Mass.
- 1768 - Germans and Acadians join French Creoles in their armed revolt against the Spanish governor of New Orleans.
- 1793 - Eli Whitney applies for a patent on the cotton gin, a machine which cleans the tight-clinging seeds from short-staple cotton easily and effectively–a job which was previously done by hand.
- 1863 - In a rare night attack, Confederates under Gen. James Longstreet attack a Federal force near Chattanooga, Tennessee, hoping to cut their supply line, the "cracker line." They fail.
- 1886 - The Statue of Liberty, originally named Liberty Enlightening the World, is dedicated at Liberty Island, N. Y., formerly Bedloe's Island, by President Grover Cleveland
- 1901 - Race riots sparked by Booker T. Washington's visit to the White House kill 34.
- 1904 - The St. Louis police try a new investigation method: fingerprints.
- 1914 - The German cruiser Emden, disguised as a British ship, steams into Penang Harbor near Malaya and sinks the Russian light cruiser Zhemchug.
- 1914 - George Eastman announces the invention of the color photographic process.
- 1919 - Over President Wilson's veto, Congress passes the National Prohibition Act, or Volstead Act, named after its promoter, Congressman Andrew J. Volstead. It provides enforcement guidelines for the Prohibition Amendment.
- 1927 - Pan American Airways launches the first scheduled international flight.
- 1940 - Italy invades Greece, launching six divisions on four fronts from occupied Albania.
- 1944 - The first B-29 Superfortress bomber mission flies from the airfields in the Mariana Islands in a strike against the Japanese base at Truk.
- 1960 - In a note to the OAS (Organization of American States), the United States charges that Cuba has been receiving substantial quantities of arms and numbers of military technicians" from the Soviet bloc.
28 October Birthdays
- 1875 - Gilbert Grosvenor, editor, turned the National Geographic Society's irregularly published pamphlet into a periodical with a circulation of nearly two million.
- 1896 - Howard Hansen, composer, director of the Eastman School of music.
- 1903 - Evelyn Waugh, English novelist who wrote Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited.
- 1909 - Francis Bacon, English artist who painted expressionist portraits.
- 1912 - Richard Doll, English epidemiologist who established a link between tobacco smoke and cancer.
- 1914 - Jonas Salk, U.S. scientist who developed the first vaccine against polio.
- 1955 - William Gates, the chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software firm.