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Lynyrd Skynyrd is an American southern rock band that became prominent in the southern United States in 1973 and rose to worldwide recognition before several members, including lead vocalist and primary songwriter Ronnie Van Zant, died in a crash in 1977 five miles northeast of Gillsburg, Mississippi.

On Thursday, October 20, 1977, just three days after the release of Street Survivors and four dates into their most successful headlining tour to date, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s chartered Convair 240 developed mechanical difficulties near the end of their flight from Greenville, South Carolina to LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The pilots attempted an emergency landing on a small airstrip but the plane ran out of fuel and crashed in a forest near Gillsburg. Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kirkpatrick and the two pilots were killed on impact.

Medical personnel arrived quickly and ferried out the injured and the dead. Victims were taken to the hospital in nearby McComb and Jackson. Artemis Pyle, the only band member who was ambulatory, crawled out of the plane wreckage and hiked some distance from the crash site through swampy woods with two road crew members to get help. Lynyrd Skynyrd disbanded after the tragedy. A tribute band was formed in 1987 for a reunion tour with Johnny Van Zant, Ronnie’s younger brother, and continues to record music today.

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The Battle of Zama was fought around October 19, 202 BC and marked the final and decisive end of the Second Punic War. A Roman army led by Scipio Africanus defeated a Carthaginian force led by Hannibal. Soon after this defeat on their home ground, the Carthaginian senate sued for peace, ending the 17-year war.

Despite nearly two years of constant victories, much of it on Italian soil, the Carthaginian commander Hannibal was still in Italy, although confined to the south of the peninsula. Scipio led an army of Roman legionnaires, with Hannibal leading an army composed of local citizens and veterans from his Italian campaigns. Hannibal’s army consisted of 50,000 infantry, 80 war elephants, and 4,000 cavalry, while Scipio had a total of 34,000 infantry and 8,700 cavalry. Putting his inexperienced cavalry on the flanks, Hannibal aligned his troops in three straight lines behind 80 war elephants.

Hannibal hoped that the combination of war elephants and the depth of the first two lines would weaken and disorganize the Roman advance. He would then complete a victory with his reserves in the third line and overlap Scipio’s lines. Though this formation was indeed well-conceived, it failed to produce a Carthaginian victory. In total, as many as 20,000 men of Hannibal’s army were killed in Zama, while 11,000 were wounded. The Romans lost as few as 1,500 dead and 5,000 wounded.

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Re-Animator is a 1985 horror film directed by Stuart Gordon and based on H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West: Reanimator.” It stars Jeffrey Combs as Dr. Herbert West, a medical student who transfers from a school in Europe to the medical school of Miskatonic University to continue developing a formula to revive the dead.

The film has since become a cult film, driven by fans of Combs, extreme gore, and the successful combination of horror and comedy. The idea to make Re-Animator came from a discussion Gordon had with friends one night about vampire movies. He felt there were too many and expressed a desire to see a Frankenstein movie. Originally, Gordon was going to adapt Lovecraft’s story for the stage but then writers Dennis Paoli and William Norris and Gordon decided to do it as a half hour television pilot.

Gordon was told that the only market for horror was in feature films and was introduced to producer Brian Yuzna. Re-Animator was released on October 18, 1985 and went on to make $2 million in North America, well above its $900,000 budget. It was well-received by critics, earning mostly positive reviews, including Roger Ebert who gave it three out of four stars. It has spawned two sequels, Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator.

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Jimmy Breslin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American columnist and author. He has written numerous novels and columns of his have appeared regularly in various newspapers in his hometown of New York City. He was a regular columnist for the newspaper Newsday until his retirement on November 2, 2004.

Breslin’s career as a investigative journalist led him to cultivate ties with various Mafia and criminal elements in the city, not always with positive results. In 1970, he was viciously attacked and beaten at The Suite, a restaurant then owned by Lucchese crime family associate Henry Hill. The attack was carried out by mobster Jimmy Burke, who objected to an article Breslin had written involving another member of the Lucchese family, Paul Vario.

In 1977, at the height of the Son of Sam scare in New York City, the killer, later identified as David Berkowitz, addressed letters to Breslin. Among his notable columns, perhaps the best known was published the day after John F. Kennedy’s funeral, focusing on the man who had dug the President’s grave. Breslin has received numerous accolades throughout his career. In 1985, he received a George Polk Award for Metropolitan reporting, while in 1986, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

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The Great Storm of 1987 occurred on the night of October 15 to 16, 1987, when an unusually strong weather system caused winds to hit much of southern England and northern France. It was the worst storm to hit England since the Great Storm of 1703 and was responsible fro the deaths of 23 people.

According to the Beaufort scale of wind intensities, this storm had winds of hurricane force. The storm had an air pressure equal to that of a Category 3 hurricane and wind speeds equal to a Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. The storm originated from a cold front in the Bay of Biscay that met with a warm front headed north from Africa. The storm made landfall in Cornwall before tracking northeast towards Devon and then over the Midlands, going out to sea via The Wash.

The strongest gusts, of up to 100 knots, were recorded along the southeastern edge of the storm, hitting mainly Essex and Kent. The storm caused substantial damages over much of England, downing some 14 million trees, blocking roads and railways and leaving widespread structural damage to buildings. Several hundred thousand people were left without power. The storm cost the insurance industry two billion pounds and this makes it the second most expensive UK weather event.

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The Black Panther Party was a Marxist/Maoist African American organization established to promote Black Power and self-defense. It was active in the United States from the mid-1960s into the 1970s. It was founded in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale on October 15, 1966.

The organization initially set forth a doctrine calling for the protection of African American neighborhoods from police brutality in the interest of African American justice. Its objectives and philosophy changed radically during the party’s existence. Ideological consensus within the party was difficult to achieve with some members openly disagreeing with the views of the leaders. In 1967, the organization marched on the California State Capitol in Sacramento to protest a ban on weapons.

By 1968, the party had expanded into many cities throughout the U.S., including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York City, and Baltimore. While firmly grounded in black nationalism and begun as an organization that accepted only African Americans as members, the party changed as it grew to national prominence and became an icon of the counterculture of the 1960s. They became more focused on socialism without racial exclusivity. After party membership started to decline during Huey Newton’s 1968 manslaughter trial, the Black Panther Party collapsed in the early 1970s.

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Winnie-the-Pooh, commonly shortened to Pooh Bear, is a fictional bear created by A.A. Milne. The character first appeared in book form in Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Milne also included several poems about Pooh Bear in the children’s poetry books When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.

Milne named the character Winnie-the-Pooh after a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was the basis for the character Christopher Robin. His toys also lent their names to most of the other characters, except for Owl and Rabbit, who where probably based on real animals. Christopher Milne had named his teddy after Winnipeg, a bear which he and his father often saw at London Zoo, and “Pooh,” a swan they had met while on holiday.

The home of the Milnes, Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, was the basis for the setting of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The name of the fictional “Hundred Acre Wood” is reminiscent of the Five Hundred Acre Wood, which lies just outside Ashdown Forest and includes some of the locations mentioned in the book, such as the Enchanted Place. Pooh first appeared in December 1925, when what became the first chapter of the book Winnie-the-Pooh was commissioned as a Christmas story by London’s Evening News. The book was published on October 14, 1926.

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The Battle of Queenston Heights was a British victory during the War of 1812 which took place on October 13, 1812, near Queenston, Ontario. It was fought between United States regulars and New York militia forces led by Major General Stephen Van Rensselaer, and British forces led by Major General Sir Isaac Brock and Major General Sir Roger Hale Sheaffe.

The battle was the largest in the year to that point and was fought as a result of an American attempt to establish a foothold on the Canadian side of the Niagara River before the onset of winter. This decisive battle was the result of a poorly managed American campaign and is most historically significant for the fact that in it, the British lost their commander, General Brock, who was killed by an unknown shooter. The Americans, who were stationed in Lewiston, New York, were unable to get the bulk of their forces across the Niagara River due to the work of British artillery and reluctance on the part of the untrained and inexperienced American militia.

Of General Van Rensselaer’s 6,000 troops, 300 were killed or wounded and another 958 taken prisoner, including 67 other officers. General Van Rensselaer, his attack a dismal failure, resigned immediately after the battle. The question of who to blame for the defeat was one that was never resolved.

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Hugh Jackman is a Tony and Emmy Award-winning Australian actor of film, theater and television, known mostly for his roles in several major Hollywood films, including Van Helsing and the X-Men series. He was born in Pymble, Sydney, New South Wales and attended Pymble Public School and Knox Grammar School, an all-boys school, where he starred in the musical My Fair Lady.

Jackman later used his inheritance from his grandmother to attend the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts of Edith Cowan University in Perth, from which he graduated in 1994. His early work included appearance on TV and in the theater. He first became known outside of Australia when he played the leading role in the Royal National Theatre’s acclaimed stage production of Oklahoma! during 1998.

In 2000, Jackman was cast as Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, replacing Dougray Scott. An instant star upon the film’s instant release, he went on to star in the 2001 romantic comedy Kate and Leopold, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. He played the title role of a vampire hunter in Van Helsing in 2004 and won a Tony Award for his Broadway portrayal of Australian songwriter/performer Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz. In 2005, Jackman began filming his most challenging role to date in Darren Aronofsky’s science fiction film, The Fountain, which divided critics and did not do well at the box office.

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In 1974, NBC Tonight Show host Johnny Carson requested that the weekend broadcasts of “Best of Carson” come to an end so that he could take two weeknights off. To fill the gap, the network drew up some ideas and brought in Dick Ebersol to develop a 90-minute late-night variety show. He hired Canadian producer Lorne Michaels to be the show-runner.

When the first show aired on October 11, 1975, with George Carlin as its host, it was called NBC’s Saturday Night, because ABC featured a program at the same time titled Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. After the Cosell program was canceled in 1976, the NBC program changed its name on March 26, 1977. The original concept was for a comedy-variety show featuring young comedians, live musical performances, and short films by Albert Brooks.

Rather than have one permanent host, Michaels elected to have a different guest host each week. The original repertory company was called the “Not Ready for Prime-Time Players” and featured Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, and Garrett Morris. The original head writer was Michael O’Donoghue, a writer at National Lampoon, and the original theme music was written by Howard Shore.

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