Today in History for Oct. 19: In 1216, King John of England died after consuming what was described as an excessive number of peaches and too much beer. In 1656, Massachusetts passed a law preventing the further immigration of Quakers into the Puritan colony.
This resulted in the establishment of Pennsylvania as a Quaker colony. In 1745, Jonathan Swift, an English satirist, churchman and political writer, died. In 1781, Gen.
Lord Cornwallis surrendered the British garrison of 7,000 at Yorktown, Va., after a three-week siege in 1781. He had been sent to seize the harbour for the British fleet but found himself bottled up by the French.
The capture of Yorktown virtually ended the American War of Independence and the British hurried to make peace. In 1812, French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte began their retreat from Moscow. In 1844, as many as 200 people drowned when strong winds forced water from Lake Ontario and Lake Erie onto the streets of Toronto and Buffalo.
In 1864, a group of Confederate soldiers based in Canada attacked the town of St. Alban's, Vt. The soldiers robbed a bank of $200,000 and killed one man in their escape.
The incident strained Canadian-American relations already weakened by the events of the American Civil War. In 1945, the House of Commons ratified the UN charter. In 1950, United Nations forces entered Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
In 1951, the U.S. Congress officially declared the end of war with Germany.
In 1954, at Cairo, Britain signed .