What happened on 24 October?

13 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1929 Great Depression Worst economic downturn of the industrial era; mass unemployment for a decade.
2. 1648 Peace of Westphalia Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück end the Thirty Years' War; foundational moment for the modern state system.
3. 1945 United Nations founded International body to prevent future world wars; replaces the failed League of Nations.
4. 1929 Wall Street Crash Black Thursday panic begins the crash (Black Tuesday follows on 29 Oct); wipes out US stock values and starts the Great Depression.
5. 1648 Thirty Years' War ends Conventional end of Thirty Years' War.
6. 1962 Soviet ships stop at the quarantine line The quarantine of Cuba takes effect at 10 am and the Soviet missile-carrying ships stop dead or turn for home — 'we're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked
7. 1917 Battle of Caporetto Central Powers smash Italian lines; near-collapse of Italian army.
8. 1956 The Protocol of Sèvres In a villa outside Paris, Britain, France and Israel secretly agree the script: Israel will invade Sinai, and Britain and France will 'intervene' to separate the combatants — and t
9. 1929 Woolf's A Room of One's Own 'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' — Woolf's founding essay of feminist literary history.
10. 1860 The Convention of Peking With the Summer Palace in ashes and allied troops in Beijing, China ratifies everything conceded at Tientsin and adds Kowloon and an indemnity; Russia, playing broker, quietly take
11. 1795 Third Partition of Poland Russia, Prussia and Austria carve up what remains of Poland-Lithuania, erasing it from the map for 123 years.
12. 1973 DEFCON 3: the superpowers lean in When Brezhnev proposes joint intervention to save the encircled Third Army — and hints at acting alone — Washington answers overnight by raising its nuclear forces to DEFCON 3, the
13. 1537 Death of Jane Seymour Twelve days after giving birth to the future Edward VI, Jane Seymour dies of postnatal complications at Hampton Court. Henry VIII, who had finally got a male heir, mourned her as h