Today’s Highlight in History:

On October 13, 1775, the United States Navy had its origins as the Continental Congress ordered the construction of a naval fleet.

On this date:

In A.D. 54, Roman Emperor Claudius I died, poisoned apparently at the behest of his wife, Agrippina.

In 1792, the cornerstone of the executive mansion, later known as the White House, was laid during a ceremony in the District of Columbia.

In 1843, the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith was founded in New York City.

In 1932, President Herbert Hoover and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes laid the cornerstone for the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington.

In 1944, during World War II, American troops entered Aachen, Germany.

In 1957, CBS-TV broadcast “The Edsel Show,” a one-hour live special starring Bing Crosby designed to promote the new, ill-fated Ford automobile. (It was the first special to use videotape technology to delay the broadcast to the West Coast.)

In 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon held the third televised debate of their presidential campaign (Nixon was in Los Angeles, Kennedy in New York).

In 1962, Edward Albee’s four-character drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway.

In 1972, a Uruguayan chartered flight carrying 45 people crashed in the Andes; survivors resorted to feeding off the remains of some of the dead in order to stay alive until they were rescued more than two months later.

In 1981, voters in Egypt participated in a referendum to elect Vice President Hosni Mubarak the new president, one week after the assassination of Anwar Sadat.

In 1990, Le Duc Tho, co-founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party, died in Hanoi a day before his 79th birthday.

In 2000, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Longtime American communist Gus Hall died in New York at age 90.

Ten years ago: British playwright Harold Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature. Scores of Islamic militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings in Nalchik, a city in Russia’s turbulent Caucasus region, leaving 139 people dead, most of them insurgents.

Five years ago: Rescuers in Chile using a missile-like escape capsule pulled 33 men one by one to fresh air and freedom 69 days after they were trapped in a collapsed mine a half-mile underground. U.S. authorities announced the arrests of 73 people accused of being part of a vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates who allegedly used phantom health care clinics and other means to try to cheat Medicare out of $163 million.

One year ago: President Barack Obama huddled with some of his senior national security aides and with top administration health officials for the latest assessment on the government’s response to Ebola in the aftermath of a Dallas nurse’s contracting the disease. Frenchman Jean Tirole was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in economics for showing how to encourage better products and competitive prices in industries dominated by a few companies.

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