1. On this day in 1978, Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for negotiations that resulted first in the Camp David Accords, then in a peace treaty between their countries.
2. Catalonia's parliament voted to declare the region independent from Spain, resulting in the central government's dismissing that legislative body and calling for new elections, in which the majority of seats were claimed by the pro-independence movement.
3. American singer Taylor Swift released 1989, which she described as her first “official pop album”; it was a blockbuster hit and won the Grammy Award for album of the year.
4. The Boston Red Sox ended the “Curse of the Bambino”—an alleged hex on the team that resulted from its 1920 sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees—by defeating the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series title, the team's first in 86 years.
5. At a concert near Tel Aviv, the music of German composer Richard Wagner, which many associate with the Nazi regime, was played for the first time in public in Israel.
6. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, an island country lying within the Lesser Antilles in the eastern Caribbean Sea, achieved its independence.
7. Physicist Lise Meitner, whose research (along with that of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann) led to the discovery of nuclear fission, died in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England.
8. The first Saturn rocket was successfully launched, and years later the Saturn V was the launch vehicle used in the Apollo Moon-landing flights.
9. American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath—whose best-known works are preoccupied with alienation, death, and self-destruction—was born.
10. Pinckney's Treaty, an agreement between the United States and Spain, was signed, giving the United States navigation rights on the Mississippi River.
11. Christopher Columbus sailed to Cuba and claimed the island for Spain.
12. Athelstan, the first king to rule over all of England, died.

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