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Today in History, October 15th

On October 15, 1917, France executed dancer Mata Hari as a German spy. Plus the I Love Lucy debut and China's first crewed spaceflight.

By Today in History Updated November 10, 2026 3 min read Sources checked

Published October 15, 2026 · Last updated November 10, 2026

October 15 is best known as the day in 1917 when France executed the dancer Mata Hari as a German spy, a verdict many historians have questioned. The date also brought the TV debut of I Love Lucy in 1951 and China’s first crewed spaceflight in 2003.

The big story: Mata Hari Is Executed (1917)

Margaretha Zelle was a Dutch woman who reinvented herself. After years in Southeast Asia with a husband in the Dutch colonial army, she landed in Paris in 1905 and became Mata Hari, an “exotic” dancer with a made-up backstory about a birth in an Indian temple. The dances owed less to Java than to the art of removing clothes slowly, and audiences across Europe loved them. During World War I she kept company with officers from several armies. That made her useful to spymasters and suspicious to everyone else. There is some evidence she took German money, and she may also have offered her services to France, but the Germans reportedly thought she delivered very little. French authorities arrested her in February 1917. A military court in July, using thin and largely circumstantial evidence, blamed her for the deaths of many Allied soldiers and sentenced her to die. On October 15 a firing squad shot her at Vincennes, outside Paris. Some historians argue France needed a villain to explain its battlefield losses.

More events on October 15

Year	What happened
1863	The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sank during a test run, killing its inventor and seven crewmen.
1880	Victorio, a Chiricahua Apache leader known as a gifted military strategist, was killed in the Tres Castillos Mountains south of El Paso, Texas.
1928	The airship Graf Zeppelin landed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, finishing its first flight across the Atlantic.
1934	Chinese Communist forces set out on the Long March, the retreat that ended with Mao Zedong as the party’s unchallenged leader.
1940	Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, a send-up of Hitler and Nazism, premiered in New York City.
1946	Hermann Göring, the senior Nazi official Hitler had named as his successor, took his own life.
1951	I Love Lucy premiered on CBS, introducing viewers to Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.
1966	Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party.
1989	Wayne Gretzky passed Gordie Howe to become the NHL’s career points leader in a game against the Edmonton Oilers.
1991	The Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52 to 48 after bitterly fought hearings.
2003	China became the third country to launch a crewed spaceflight when Yang Liwei flew aboard Shenzhou 5.
2017	The Me Too movement spread worldwide after actress Alyssa Milano urged survivors of sexual harassment and assault to share their stories online.

Born on October 15

70 BCE: Virgil, Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid, born near Mantua (the traditional date).
1844: Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher and critic of traditional morality.
1858: John L. Sullivan, heavyweight boxing champion and the biggest sports star of the bare-knuckle era.
1923: Italo Calvino, Italian novelist and storyteller, born in Cuba.