On Oct. 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday” descended on the New York Stock Exchange. Stock prices collapsed amid panicked selling, $14 billion in value was lost, and thousands of investors were wiped out, triggering America’s Great Depression.

In 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh, the English courtier, military adventurer and poet, was executed in London for allegedly conspiring against King James I.

In 1922, Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, is appointed Italian prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III. (He was dismissed by Emmanuel in 1943 after the Allied invasion of Italy and was executed by partisans in 1945).

In 1940, a blindfolded Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson drew the first number — 158 — from a glass bowl in America’s first peacetime military draft.

In 1956, the Suez Crisis b

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