The History Channel sends a "what happened this week" email:
4 October 1970: Janis Joplin dies at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood, California of a heroin overdose. The death of the troubled 27-year-old singer, who had played at Woodstock the previous year after rising to fame as a lead singer for blues and psychedelic bands, came just sixteen days after the death of rock icon Jimi Hendrix. The posthumous release of Pearl, which included the single Me and Bobby McGee, would become the largest selling record of her career.
6 October 1781: Continental troops and their French allies, led by General George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau, begin to dig a two-thousand-yard trench around Yorktown, Virginia, as some eighteen thousand men prepare to lay siege to the British-occupied city. English general Charles Cornwallis would surrender the city two weeks later, effectively ending the American Revolutionary War.
7 October 1913: Henry Ford's automobile factory introduces a moving assembly line, which includes subassemblies for transmissions, engines, and magnetos. Soon a system for assembling an entire car is established, vastly increasing productivity and reducing the cost of a Model T by about one-third. The system, which would be mirrored by other manufacturers, would mark a new dawn in the American automobile industry.
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