October 14 in History

On 14 October 1066, near the Sussex town now called Battle, William, Duke of Normandy, defeated the English king Harold II in a single day of fighting. Harold died on the field, and within weeks William was poised to take the English crown. The battle opened the Norman Conquest, which reshaped English government, landholding, language, and culture over the following two centuries, a span reflected in the dates given for this event.

On 14 October 1956, in the central Indian city of Nagpur, the jurist and social reformer B. R. Ambedkar publicly embraced Buddhism and led a very large crowd of followers, mostly Dalits, in doing the same. The event is often described as a Buddhist revival in India, a country where the religion had largely faded from public life many centuries earlier. It mattered because it was both a spiritual choice and a political act: a rejection of the caste hierarchy that had consigned Dalits, once called "untouchables," to the bottom of Indian society.