Today in History, October 9th
On October 9, 1635, Massachusetts Bay Colony banished Roger Williams, who went on to found Providence. Plus Che Guevara's execution and the Malala attack.
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October 9 is best known for 1635, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony banished religious dissident Roger Williams, who went on to found Providence as a haven for freedom of conscience. The date also saw Che Guevara executed in Bolivia in 1967 and Malala Yousafzai shot by a Taliban gunman in 2012.
The big story: Massachusetts banishes Roger Williams (1635)
Roger Williams was a religious dissident with a habit of saying unwelcome things. He argued that civil authorities had no business punishing people for their religious beliefs, and he objected to colonists taking land from Native Americans. Neither view went over well with the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On October 9, 1635 (Old Style), the colony’s General Court ordered him banished. Williams headed south and, with help from the Narragansett people, settled where two rivers meet near Narragansett Bay, in what is now Rhode Island. He called the place Providence. The settlement made a point of welcoming anyone seeking “freedom of conscience,” and it kept church and civil affairs apart. People who did not fit elsewhere found a home there, among them unhappy Puritans, Anne Hutchinson, Quakers, and some of the first Jewish settlers in North America. Williams also started the first Baptist church in America and compiled the first dictionary of a Native American language. The principle that got him thrown out of Massachusetts became his colony’s founding idea.
More events on October 9
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1514 | Mary Tudor of England became the third wife of King Louis XII of France. |
| 1888 | The Washington Monument opened to the public. |
| 1936 | Hoover Dam (then called Boulder Dam) began sending electricity to Los Angeles over 266 miles of transmission lines. |
| 1946 | Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh opened on Broadway. |
| 1963 | A landslide sent a huge wave over the Vajont Dam in Italy, killing more than 2,000 people in the valley below. |
| 1967 | Revolutionary Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia, a day after his capture. |
| 1974 | Oskar Schindler, credited with saving about 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, died at 66. |
| 1975 | Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. His government barred him from going to Oslo to accept it. |
| 1990 | David Souter began serving as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. |
| 1992 | A meteorite crashed through a parked Chevy Malibu in Peekskill, New York. |
| 2004 | Afghanistan held its first direct presidential election, which Hamid Karzai won. |
| 2012 | A Taliban gunman shot Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai. She survived and later won the Nobel Peace Prize. |
Born on October 9
- 1879: Max von Laue, German physicist who won the 1914 Nobel Prize for showing that crystals diffract X-rays, born near Koblenz.
- 1940: John Lennon, singer and songwriter with the Beatles and as a solo artist, born in Liverpool, England.
- 1964: Guillermo del Toro, Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, born in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Sources
- Rhode Island founder banished from Massachusetts, History.com
- This Day in History: October 9, History.com
- On This Day: October 9, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Max von Laue, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- John Lennon, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Guillermo del Toro, Encyclopaedia Britannica
