📜 This Day in History

October 19

• 1579A ceremony was held in Edinburgh marking the coming of age of James VI of Scotland as an adult ruler.
• 1781American Revolutionary War: British forces led by Lord Cornwallis officially surrendered to Franco-American forces under George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau, ending the Siege of Yorktown.
• 1943World War II: Allied aircraft sank the German cargo ship Sinfra, killing mostly Italian POWs.
• 1965Vietnam War: The Siege of Plei Me began with the first major confrontation between soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army and the U.S. Army.
• 1988The British government restricted the broadcast of the voices of representatives from Sinn Féin and several Irish republican and loyalist paramilitary groups on television and radio.
• 2017Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk discovered ʻOumuamua, the first known interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System.

Born on this day

• 1899Miguel Ángel Asturias, Guatemalan journalist, author, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1974)
• 1910Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Indian-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1995)
• 1931John le Carré, English intelligence officer and author (died 2020)
• 1946Philip Pullman, English author and academic