Today in History: October 21: A day of military might, school tragedies, and homicides. In 1797, the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution, also known as “Old Ironsides,” was christened in Boston’s harbor. In 1805, a British fleet commanded by Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated a French-Spanish fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1940, Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was first published. In 1944, U.S. troops captured the German city of Aachen — the first German city to fall to American forces in World War II. In 1959, the Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened in New York. In 1966, 144 people were killed when a coal waste landslide engulfed a school and some 20 houses in Aberfan, Wales. In 2013, a seventh-grader at Sparks Middle School in Sparks, Nevada, shot and killed a teacher and wounded two classmates before taking his own life. In 2014, Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius was convicted of culpable homicide for shooting and killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. The conviction was later upgraded to murder. In 2021, Actor Alec Baldwin was pointing a gun on a movie set in New Mexico when it went off and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza.