#TodayInHistory – October 11

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October 11 – Some important events on this day.

1138 👉🏼 Earthquake in Aleppo, Syria, kills an estimated 230,000
1634 👉🏼 Burchardi flood – “the second Grote Mandrenke” kills about 15,000 in North Friesland, Denmark and Germany
1737 👉🏼 Earthquake kills 300,000 and destroys half of Calcutta, India
1746 👉🏼 Battle of Rocoux: French defeat British, Austrian and Dutch armies
1797 👉🏼 Battle of Camperdown (Kamperduin): British navy defeats Dutch fleet
1811 👉🏼 The Juliana, 1st steam-powered ferryboat, begins operation
1852 👉🏼 The University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest university, is inaugurated in Sydney.
1881 👉🏼 David Houston patents roll film for cameras
1915 👉🏼 Bulgaria enters World War I
1922 👉🏼 First woman FBI “special investigator”, Alaska Davidson, appointed
1939 👉🏼 Albert Einstein informs FDR of the possibilities of an atomic bomb
1945 👉🏼 Chinese civil war begins between Kuomintang government led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party
1962 👉🏼 Second Vatican Council (21st ecumenical) convened by Pope John XXIII
1971 👉🏼 John Lennon’s “Imagine” is released

1986 👉🏼 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev open talks at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.
One was the conservative icon of the American right, who once lambasted Russia as an “evil empire”, the other the communist leader of the Soviet Union, and together they forged an unlikely relationship to deescalate the Cold War.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met at Reykjavik in Iceland for two days in October 1986. While Gorbachev sought to limit the talks strictly to arms control, while Reagan wanted to include talks about human rights in the Soviet Union.
The talks collapsed at the last minute, but the significant progress nonetheless led to the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, an important agreement in the reduction of Cold War tensions between the US and the USSR.