O c t o b e r 8 t h 1871
Great Chicago Fire
On this day in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire began in the barn of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, and, by the time the blaze died out two days later, a large swath of the city had been devastated and some 300 people killed.
1871
Peshtigo Fire
The city of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, burned to the ground in hours, killing 1,152 people.
1957
United Kingdom
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.
1967
Clement Attlee
British politician Clement Attlee—who, while serving as prime minister of the United Kingdom (1945–51), presided over the establishment of a welfare state in his country and the granting of independence to India—died at age 84.
1970
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of the Soviet Gulag forced-labour camp system.
After serving in the Soviet Army during World War II, he was sentenced to spend eight years in a labour camp and then internal exile for criticizing Josef Stalin in a private letter. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Although the reforms brought by Nikita Khrushchev freed him from exile in 1956, the publication of Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) beyond the Soviet Union angered authorities, and Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship in 1974. He was flown to West Germany, and in 1976 he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. Shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored in 1990, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies.
2004
Martha Stewart
American domestic lifestyle innovator Martha Stewart reported to a federal prison in West Virginia to begin her five-month sentence for insider trading.
2005
Killing at least 79,000 people, an earthquake struck the Pakistan-administered portion of the Kashmir region and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan.
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