On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious and anonymous inventor of Bitcoin, released the Bitcoin white paper, introducing the cryptocurrency—and how it could be used—to the world.

On October 31, 1997, 33-year-old Violet Palmer becomes the first woman to officiate an NBA game.

On October 31, 1993, the 23-year-old actor River Phoenix, who appeared in such films as Stand by Me and My Own Private Idaho, dies of a drug overdose outside a West Hollywood nightclub.

Undressed but unmoving, the Windmill Girls were a big hit at a London theatre that used the slogan, ‘We never closed.’ But on this day it did.

On October 31, 1963, American television impresario Ed Sullivan, waiting for a flight at London’s Heathrow Airport, happens to witness the pandemonium of Beatlemania—a pop-culture fever then raging in the U.

Five years after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalinism and the “personality cult” of Soviet rulers at the 20th Party Congress, Joseph Stalin’s embalmed body is removed from Lenin’s tomb in Moscow’s Red Square.

On October 31, 1950, 21-year-old Earl Lloyd becomes the first African American to play in an NBA game when he takes the court in the season opener for the Washington Capitols.

Harry Houdini, the most celebrated magician and escape artist of the 20th century, dies of peritonitis in a Detroit hospital.

On October 31, 1864, anxious to have support of the Republican-dominated Nevada Territory for President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection, the U.

On October 31, 1776, in his first speech before British Parliament since the leaders of the American Revolution came together to sign the Declaration of Independence that summer, King George III acknowledges that all was not going well for Britain in the war with the United States.