1776 The St. James Chronicle of London carries an item announcing "The very identical Dr. Franklyn [Benjamin Franklin], whom Lord Chatham [former leading parliamentarian and colonial supporter William Pitt] so much caressed, and used to say he was proud in calling his friend, is now at the head of the rebellion in North America."
Benjamin Franklin, joint postmaster general of the colonies (1753-1774), and his son William traveled to London together in 1757. There, for the next five years, William studied law, and Franklin studied social climbing. They had remarkable success for a candle-maker's son and his illegitimate progeny. By the end of their sojourn, William had become an attorney and received an honorary Master of Arts from Oxford University, while his father reveled in honorary doctorates from Oxford and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The elder Franklin's plans for his son's advancement succeeded, and his son won the choicest of appointments, a royal governorship, in 1762.
Franklin then accompanied his son from London to Pennsylvania, only to return to London as Pennsylvania's agent in 1764, where he lobbied for the placement of the colony under direct royal control. He soon added Georgia, New Jersey and Massachusetts to the list of colonies for which he served as spokesperson in Parliament.
In 1775, Franklin returned to America as the American Revolution approached; he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and, in 1776, signed the Declaration of Independence. Ironically, his son William came out on the side of the British during the War of Independence and was imprisoned while serving as the Loyalist governor of New Jersey. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
1825 The first ship made in the U.S. with sheet iron was tested on the Susquehanna River. Named the Codorus, the vessel was built by Quaker John Elgar at York, Pa. using sheet iron fastened with iron rivets. The ship weighted five tons, of which two tons was for the coal- and wood- fueled boiler which provided power for an 8 h.p. engine. With a keel length of 60-ft and a 9-ft beam, the ship drew about seven inches of water. The next spring, the steamboat performed according to design by completing an upriver trip to Binghamton, N.Y. - the only steamboat to do so. The difficult three-month voyage proved that upstream navigation on the shallow, rock-filled Susquehanna was impractical.
1832 The first street car to be used in the U.S. took its initial trip with municipal officals in New York City. Named the John Mason, after a prominent New York Banker, the carriage was horse-drawn and rode on iron wheels along iron rails laid in the middle of the road. The track ran along Fourth Avenue from Prince Street to 14th Street. The carriage had three non-connecting compartments, each able to carry ten passengers. Public transportation began on 26 Nov 1832 for a fare of 12-1/2 cents. The conveyance was designed and built by John Stephenson in Philadelphia. Although horses had previously been used to haul trains on railroad tracks, this was the first horse-drawn street-car.
1862 American Civil War:President Abraham Lincoln approves General Ambrose Burnside's plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, leading to the Battle of Fredericksburg.
1851 Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville about the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, is published by Harper & Brothers in New York. Moby-Dick is now considered a great classic of American literature and contains one of the most famous opening lines in fiction: "Call me Ishmael." Initially, though, the book about Captain Ahab and his quest for a giant white whale was a flop.
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 and as a young man spent time in the merchant marines, the U.S. Navy and on a whaling ship in the South Seas. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, a romantic adventure based on his experiences in Polynesia. The book was a success and a sequel, Omoo, was published in 1847. Three more novels followed, with mixed critical and commercial results. Melville's sixth book, Moby-Dick, was first published in October 1851 in London, in three volumes titled The Whale, and then in the U.S. a month later. Melville had promised his publisher an adventure story similar to his popular earlier works, but instead, Moby-Dick was a tragic epic, influenced in part by Melville's friend and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels include The Scarlet Letter.
After Moby-Dick's disappointing reception, Melville continued to produce novels, short stories (Bartleby) and poetry, but writing wasn't paying the bills so in 1865 he returned to New York to work as a customs inspector, a job he held for 20 years.
Melville died in 1891, largely forgotten by the literary world. By the 1920s, scholars had rediscovered his work, particularly Moby-Dick, which would eventually become a staple of high school reading lists across the United States. Billy Budd, Melville's final novel, was published in 1924, 33 years after his death.
1871 A preliminary meeting leading to the organization of the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference was held at Fort Wayne, Indiana through 16 November.
1882 Franklin Leslie kills Billy "The Kid" Claiborne On this day, the gunslinger Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie shoots the Billy "The Kid" Claiborne dead in the streets of Tombstone, Arizona.
The town of Tombstone is best known today as the site of the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral. In the 1880s, however, Tombstone was home to many gunmen who never achieved the enduring fame of Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday. Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie was one of the most notorious of these largely forgotten outlaws.
There are few surviving details about Leslie's early life. At different times, he claimed to have been born in both Texas and Kentucky, to have studied medicine in Europe, and to have been an army scout in the war against the Apache Indians. No evidence has ever emerged to support or conclusively deny these claims. The first historical evidence of Leslie's life emerges in 1877, when he became a scout in Arizona. A few years later, Leslie was attracted to the moneymaking opportunities of the booming mining town of Tombstone, where he opened the Cosmopolitan Hotel in 1880. That same year he killed a man named Mike Killeen during a quarrel over Killeen's wife, and he married the woman shortly thereafter.
Leslie's reputation as a cold-blooded killer brought him trouble after his drinking companion and fellow gunman John Ringo was found dead in July 1882. Some Tombstone citizens, including a young friend of Ringo's named Billy "The Kid" Claiborne, were convinced that Leslie had murdered Ringo, though they could not prove it. Probably seeking vengeance and the notoriety that would come from shooting a famous gunslinger, Claiborne unwisely decided to publicly challenge Leslie, who shot him dead.
The remainder of Leslie's life was equally violent and senseless. After divorcing Killeen in 1887, he took up with a Tombstone prostitute, whom he murdered several years later during a drunken rage. Even by the loose standards of frontier law in Tombstone, the murder of an unarmed woman was unacceptable, and Leslie served nearly 10 years in prison before he was paroled in 1896. After his release, he married again and worked a variety of odd jobs around the West. He reportedly made a small fortune in the gold fields of the Klondike region before he disappeared forever from the historical record.
1889 Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in seventy-two days.
1910 The first airplane flight from a ship was made by Eugene Ely from the bow of the scout cruiser Birmingham, anchored at the Hampton Roads Yatch Clubhouse at Willoughby Spit. His runway was 83 feet long, with a five degree slope, but because the plane itself was 57 feet long, the available runway for takeoff was only 26 feet. He then flew through fog and rain to Hampton Rpads, Va. For his effort, he won a $5,000 prize offereed by John Barry Ryan. Ely was a civilian pilot for the Curtiss Aviation Company. The following year, 18 Jan 1911, Ely made another first in history when he landed on he battleship USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay.
1914 In Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, the religious leader Sheikh-ul-Islam declares an Islamic holy war on behalf of the Ottoman government, urging his Muslim followers to take up arms against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro in World War I.
By the time the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914, the Ottoman Empire was faltering, having lost much of its once considerable territory in Europe with its defeat in the First Balkan War two years earlier. Seeking to ally themselves with one of the great European powers to help safeguard them against future loss, the ambitious Ottoman leaders--members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), known collectively as the Young Turks--responded favorably to overtures made by Germany in August 1914. Though Germany and Turkey secretly concluded a military alliance on August 2, the Turks did not officially take part in World War I until several months later. On October 29, the Ottoman navy--including two German ships, Goeben and Breslau, which famously eluded the British navy in the first week of the war to reach Constantinople--attacked Russian ports in the Black Sea, marking the beginning of Turkey's participation in the war.
The sheikh's declaration of a holy war, made two weeks later, urged Muslims all over the world--including in the Allied countries--to rise up and defend the Ottoman Empire, as a protector of Islam, against its enemies. "Of those who go to the Jihad for the sake of happiness and salvation of the believers in God's victory," the declaration read, "the lot of those who remain alive is felicity, while the rank of those who depart to the next world is martyrdom. In accordance with God's beautiful promise, those who sacrifice their lives to give life to the truth will have honor in this world, and their latter end is paradise." http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ottoman-empire-declares-a-holy-war
1918 The General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the USA, the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America and the United Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the South merged in New York City to form the United Lutheran Church in America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Lutheran_Church_in_America
1940 German bombers devastate the English city of Coventry, demolishing tens of thousands of buildings and killing hundreds of men, women, and children. The verb "Koventrieren" (to Coventrate) passed into the German language, meaning "to annihilate or reduce to rubble."
On November 8, Adolf Hitler had to move up his scheduled speech in Munich on the anniversary of his 1923 attempted coup in Bavaria because British bombers were on their way to take out a railway yard. Hitler was determined to avenge this audacious offensive. The Fuhrer let his bomber pilots know that he was not "willing to let an attack on the capital of the Nazi movement go unpunished."
And so, on this day, almost 500 German bombers unleashed some 150,000 incendiary bombs and more than 500 tons of high explosives on the British industrial city, taking out 27 war factories. Of the 568 people killed, more than 400 were burned so badly they could not be identified. Among the more than 60,000 buildings destroyed or severely damaged was St. Michael's Cathedral. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germans-bomb-coventry
1941 World War II: The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal sinks due to torpedo damage from U-81 sustained on November 13.
1957 US sentences Soviet spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel to 30 years & $3,000. Indicted as a Russian spy, Colonel Abel was tried in Federal court at New York City during October, 1957. Among the government witnesses to testify against him was his former trusted espionage assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Reino Hayhanen. On October 25, 1957, the jury announced its verdict -- Abel was guilty of all counts. He appeared before Judge Mortimer W. Byers on November 15, 1957, and was sentenced. On February 10, 1962, Rudolf Invanovich Abel was exchanged for the American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who was a prisoner of the Soviet Union.
1957 The Apalachin Meeting outside Binghamton, New York is raided by law enforcement, and many high level Mafia figures are arrested.
1959 On this day in 1959, an article written by Massachusetts senator and presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy appears in an issue of TV Guide. In it, Kennedy examined the influence of television, still a relatively new technology, on American political campaigns.
In the article, Kennedy mused that television had the power to bring political campaigns—and scandals—immediately and directly to the public and illuminated the contrast between political personalities. Kennedy shrewdly noted that a "slick or bombastic orator pounding the table and ringing the rafters" fared poorly against a more congenial candidate and "is not as welcome in the family living room" as a candidate with "honesty, vigor, compassion [and] intelligence." Kennedy strove to convey the latter image. He also compared Woodrow Wilson's 1919 month-long cross-country railroad trek to promote his League of Nations proposal (an exhausting trip that ended when Wilson suffered a stroke) to then-President Eisenhower's ability to reach millions of voters in a 15-minute television appearance.
A year after the publication of the article, Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, faced off in the nation's first-ever televised presidential campaign debates. A master at projecting the quintessential presidential image, Kennedy exhibited a calm demeanor and responded to questions with intelligence and decorum. While Kennedy appeared rested, well-groomed and in control, Nixon appeared flustered and his light beard, or "five-o'clock shadow," created more of a stir than his responses to the moderator's questions. As president, Kennedy continued to showcase his skill at handling the press on-camera and carefully cultivated a relationship with journalists by enlisting their direct involvement in balancing candor with secrecy.
Kennedy's article also addressed the potential perils of marrying mass media to politics. He warned that political campaigns "could be taken over by public relations experts, who tell the candidate not only how to use TV but what to say, what to stand for and what kind of person to be." He cautioned Americans to be vigilant about what they watched, and to be aware that, like game shows, political campaigns "can be fixed...It is in your power to perceive deception, to shut off gimmickry, to reward honesty, to demand legislation where needed." Without the public's acquiescence, he said, "no TV show is worthwhile and no politician can exist." http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo....erican-politics
1964 With the help of a fresh three inch cover of snow, the temperature at Ely, NV, dipped to 15 degrees below zero to establish an all-time record low for the month of November. That record of -15 degrees was later equalled on the 19th of November in 1985. (The Weather Channel)
1965 Vietnam War: The Battle of the Ia Drang begins - the first major engagement between regular American and North Vietnamese forces.
In the first major engagement of the war between regular U.S. and North Vietnamese forces, elements of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) fight a pitched battle with Communist main-force units in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands.
On this morning, Lt. Col. Harold G. Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry conducted a heliborne assault into Landing Zone X-Ray near the Chu Pong hills. Around noon, the North Vietnamese 33rd Regiment attacked the U.S. troopers. The fight continued all day and into the night. American soldiers received support from nearby artillery units and tactical air strikes. The next morning, the North Vietnamese 66th Regiment joined the attack against the U.S. unit. The fighting was bitter, but the tactical air strikes and artillery support took their toll on the enemy and enabled the 1st Cavalry troopers to hold on against repeated assaults.
At around noon, two reinforcing companies arrived and Colonel Moore put them to good use to assist his beleaguered soldiers. By the third day of the battle, the Americans had gained the upper hand. The three-day battle resulted in 834 North Vietnamese soldiers confirmed killed, and another 1,000 communist casualties were assumed.
In a related action during the same battle, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was ambushed by North Vietnamese forces as it moved overland to Landing Zone Albany. Of the 500 men in the original column, 150 were killed and only 84 were able to return to immediate duty; Company C suffered 93 percent casualties, half of them deaths.
Despite these numbers, senior American officials in Saigon declared the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley a great victory. The battle was extremely important because it was the first significant contact between U.S. troops and North Vietnamese forces. The action demonstrated that the North Vietnamese were prepared to stand and fight major battles even though they might take serious casualties. Senior American military leaders concluded that U.S. forces could wreak significant damage on the communists in such battles--this tactic lead to a war of attrition as the U.S. forces tried to wear the communists down. The North Vietnamese also learned a valuable lesson during the battle: by keeping their combat troops physically close to U.S. positions, U.S. troops could not use artillery or air strikes without risking injury to American troops. This style of fighting became the North Vietnamese practice for the rest of the war. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo....ia-drang-valley
1967 A U.S. patent for "Ruby Laser Systems" was issued to Theodore Maiman (No. 3,353,115), for which he had applied on 13 Apr 1961. He had first operated a laser based on a ruby crystal on 16 May 1960, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
1970 Southern Airways Flight 932 crashes in the mountains near Huntington, West Virginia, killing 75, including members of the Marshall University football team.
The team was returning from that day’s game, a 17-14 loss to East Carolina University. Thirty-seven Marshall football players were aboard the plane, along with the team’s coach, its doctors, the university athletic director and 25 team boosters--some of Huntington, West Virginia’s most prominent citizens--who had traveled to North Carolina to cheer on the Thundering Herd. "The whole fabric," a citizen of Huntington wrote later, "the whole heart of the town was aboard."
The crash was just the most tragic in a string of unfortunate events that had befallen the Marshall football team since about 1960. The university stadium, which hadn’t been renovated since before World War II, was condemned in 1962. From the last game of the 1966 season to midway through the 1969 season, the team hadn’t won any games. Making matters worse, the NCAA had suspended Marshall for more than 100 recruiting violations. (The Mid-American Conference had expelled the team for the same reason.) But Marshall seemed to be getting back on track: It had fired the dishonest coaches, built a new Astroturf field and started winning games again. The Thundering Herd had lost a squeaker to East Carolina on the 14th, and was looking forward to a promising season the next year.
For Huntington, the plane crash was "like the Kennedy assassination," one citizen remembers. "Everybody knows where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news." The town immediately went into mourning. Shops and government offices closed; businesses on the town’s main street draped their windows in black bunting. The university held a memorial service in the stadium the next day and cancelled Monday’s classes. There were so many funerals that they had to be spread out over several weeks. In perhaps the saddest ceremony of all, six players whose remains couldn’t be identified were buried together in Spring Hill Cemetery, on a hill overlooking their university.
Marshall got a new football coach--Jack Lengyel, from the College of Wooster in Ohio--and set about rebuilding the team. The NCAA gave the Thundering Herd special permission to let freshmen play on the varsity squad, and Lengyel cobbled together a ragtag group of first-years, walk-ons and the nine veteran players who hadn’t been on the plane that night. The team lost its first game of the 1971 season but--with a last-second touchdown that seemed almost too good to be true--defeated Ohio’s Xavier University 15-13 in its first home game since the crash. The Herd won one other game that season, and nine in Lengyel’s four-year tenure at Marshall, but none was as emotional as the first. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo....hall-university
1971 His Holiness Shenouda III (b. 3 Aug 1923) was consecrated as the 117th Patriarch of Alexandria and the See of Saint Mark, the pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenouda_III
1972 Nixon promises Thieu that U.S. will continue to support South Vietnam. One week after his re-election, President Richard Nixon extends to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu his "absolute assurance" that the United States will "take swift and severe retaliatory action" if Hanoi violates the pending cease-fire once it is in place.
Thieu responded with a list of 69 amendments that he wanted added to the peace agreement being worked out in Paris. Nixon instructed Henry Kissinger to present Le Duc Tho, the senior North Vietnamese negotiator in Paris, with Thieu's amendments. Kissinger protested that the changes were "preposterous" and might destroy chances for the treaty. Despite Kissinger's concerns, the indication that the peace accords were near completion resulted in the Dow Jones closing above 1,000 for first time. In the end, however, Kissinger was correct and the peace talks became deadlocked and were not resumed until after Nixon ordered the December bombing of North Vietnam. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo....t-south-vietnam
1974 A storm produced 15 inches of snow at the Buffalo, NY, airport, and 30 inches on the south shore of Lake Erie. (David Ludlum)
1979 Iran hostage crisis: US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive Order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.
1982 Lech Walêsa, the leader of Poland's outlawed Solidarity movement, is released after eleven months of internment of internment in a remote hunting lodge near the Soviet border. Two days before, hundreds of supporters had begun a vigil outside his home upon learning that the founder of Poland's trade union movement was being released. When Walesa finally did return home, on November 14, he was lifted above the jubilant crowd and carried to the door of his apartment, where he greeted his wife and then addressed his supporters from a second-story window.
Walesa, born in 1943, was an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk when he was fired for union agitation in 1976. When protests broke out in the Gdansk shipyard over an increase in food prices in August 1980, Walesa climbed the shipyard fence and joined the thousands of workers inside. He was elected leader of the strike committee, and three days later the strikers' demands were met. Walesa then helped coordinate other strikes in Gdansk and demanded that the Polish government allow the free formation of trade unions and the right to strike. On August 30, the government conceded to the strikers' demands, legalizing trade unionism and granting greater freedom of religious and political expression.
Millions of Polish workers and farmers came together to form unions, and Solidarity was formed as a national federation of unions, with Walesa as its chairman. Under Walesa's charismatic leadership, the organization grew in size and political influence, soon becoming a major threat to the authority of the Polish government. On December 13, 1981, martial law was declared in Poland, Solidarity was outlawed, and Walesa and other labor leaders were arrested.
In November 1982, overwhelming public outcry forced Walesa's release, but Solidarity remained illegal. In 1983, Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Fearing involuntary exile, he declined to travel to Norway to accept the award. Walesa continued as leader of the now-underground Solidarity movement, and he was subjected to continual monitoring and harassment by the communist authorities.
In 1988, deteriorating economic conditions led to a new wave of labor strikes across Poland, and the government was forced to negotiate with Walesa. In April 1989, Solidarity was again legalized, and its members were allowed to enter a limited number of candidates in upcoming elections. By September, a Solidarity-led government coalition was in place, with Walesa's colleague Tadeusz Mazowiecki as premier. In 1990, Poland's first direct presidential election was held, and Walesa won by a landslide.
President Walesa successfully implemented free-market reforms, but unfortunately he was a more effective labor leader than president. In 1995, he was narrowly defeated in his reelection by former communist Aleksander Kwasniewski, head of the Democratic Left Alliance. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/walesa-released-from-jail
1985 The first discovery of a fullerene was published in the journal Nature. In Sep 1985, the American chemists Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Richard E. Smalley, colleagues at Rice met with Sir Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex, England. In 11 days of research, they discovered the first fullerene, C60, a spherical cluster of carbon atoms. The discovery, dubbed buckminsterfullerene or buckyballs, opened a new branch of chemistry, and all three men were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work.
1986 An early season cold wave set more than 200 records from the northwestern U.S. to the east coast over a seven day period. For some places it proved to be the coldest weather of the winter season. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders - 1987)
1986 Wall Street arbitrageur Ivan Boesky pleads guilty to insider trading and agrees to pay a $100 million fine and cooperate with the Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation. "Boesky Day," as the SEC would later call it, was crucial in exposing a nationwide scandal at the heart of the `80s Wall Street boom. Boesky testified that he had gained his $200 million fortune using illegal inside information about impending mergers to trade stock in the companies involved. As a result of Boesky's confession, subpoenas were issued to some of the world's most famous financiers, including "Junk Bond King" Michael Milken. Boesky's testimony brought Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment banking company, to justice for their participation in the illegal schemes. Milken paid over a billion dollars in fines and restitution and was sentenced to 10 years in prison; two years later his sentence was reduced to time served. In addition to his own financial penalty, Boesky received a three-year sentence, 22 months of which he served at Lompoc Federal Prison in California. Following this insider trading scandal, Congress increased the penalties for securities violations. After prison, Boesky divorced his wife and relocated to La Jolla, California. In contrast to Milken and others involved, Boesky has largely avoided public attention since the scandal, though he has surfaced to testify in still-unresolved legal proceedings. Despite his cooperation with the authorities, Ivan Boesky was demonized as a national symbol of greed and an example of the dangers of `80s-era excess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Boesky http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo....rading-activity
1987 The first major snowstorm of the season hit the Southern and Central Rockies, producing 12 inches at the Brian Head ski resort in Utah overnight. Strong and gusty winds associated with the storm reached 52 mph at Ruidoso NM. In the eastern U.S., the temperature at Washington D.C. soared to 68 degrees, just three days after being buried under more than a foot of snow. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1988 A massive storm produced snow and gusty winds in the western U.S., with heavy snow in some of the higher elevations. Winds gusted to 66 mph at Show Low AZ, and Donner Summit, located in the Sierra Nevada Range of California, was buried under 23 inches of snow. Heavy rain soaked parts of California, with 3.19 inches reported at Blue Canyon. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1989 Unseasonably warm weather prevailed east of the Rockies. Temperatures reached 70 degrees as far north as New England, and readings in the 80s were reported across the southeast quarter of the nation. Nineteen cities reported record high temperatures for the date. For the second time in the month Dallas/Fort Worth TX equalled their record for November with an afternoon high of 89 degrees. The high of 91 degrees at Waco TX was their warmest of record for so late in the season. Heavy snow blanketed parts of Wyoming overnight, with a foot of snow reported at Cody, and ten inches at Yellowstone Park. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1991 American and British authorities announce indictments against two Libyan intelligence officials in connection with the downing of the Pan Am Flight 103.
1991 In Royal Oak, Michigan, a fired United States Postal Service employee goes on a shooting rampage, killing four and wounding five before committing suicide.
1995 A budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums and to run most government offices with skeleton staffs.
2002 The United States House of Representatives votes not to create an independent commission to investigate the September 11 attacks.
2003 Astronomers Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz discover 90377 Sedna, a Trans-Neptunian object. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90377_Sedna
2006 Last day for Texas' celebrated drive-in Pig Stands. On November 14, 2006, state officials close the last two of Texas' famed Pig Stand restaurants, the only remaining pieces of the nation's first drive-in restaurant empire. The restaurants' owners were bankrupt, and they owed the Texas comptroller more than $200,000 in unpaid sales taxes.
A Dallas entrepreneur named Jessie G. Kirby built the first Pig Stand along the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway in October 1921. It was a roadside barbecue restaurant unlike any other: Its patrons could drive up, eat and leave, all without budging from their automobiles. ("People with cars are so lazy," Kirby explained, "they don't want to get out of them.") Kirby lured these car-attached customers with great fanfare and spectacle. When a customer pulled into the Pig Stand parking lot, teenaged boys in white shirts and black bow ties jogged over to his car, hopped up onto the running board—sometimes before the driver had even pulled into a parking space—and took his order. (This daredevilry won the servers a nickname: carhops.) Soon, the Pig Stand drive-ins replaced the carhops with attractive young girls on roller skates, but the basic formula was the same: good-looking young people, tasty food, speedy service and auto-based convenience.
That first Pig Stand was a hit with hungry drivers, and soon it became a chain. (The slogan: "America's Motor Lunch.") Kirby and his partners made one of the first franchising arrangements in restaurant history, and Pig Stands began cropping up everywhere. By 1934, there were more than 130 Pig Stands in nine states. (Most were in California and Florida.) Meanwhile, the chain kept innovating. Many people say that California's Pig Stand No. 21 became the first drive through restaurant in the world in 1931, and food historians believe that Pig Stand cooks invented deep-fried onion rings, chicken-fried steak sandwiches and a regional specialty known as Texas Toast.
But wartime gasoline and food rationing hit the Pig Stands hard, and after the war they struggled to compete with newer, flashier drive-ins. By the end of the 1950s, all of the franchises outside of Texas had closed. By 2005, even the Texas Pig Stands were struggling to survive—only six remained in the whole state—and by the next year they had all disappeared.
In 2007, state bankruptcy trustees found a way for one Pig Stand, in San Antonio, to reopen. Though it will probably never be as popular as it once was, and customers now have to get out of their cars and go inside to eat, the restaurant remains a sentimental favorite of many Texans. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo....e-in-pig-stands
2007 The last direct-current electrical distribution system in the United States is shut down in New York City by Con Edison.
Joined: Mar 2009 Gender: Female Posts: 13,917 Location: Belle Plaine, Minnesota
Re: United States History: November 14 « Reply #1 on Nov 13, 2012, 7:24pm »
Births
1765 Robert Fulton (d 1815) American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success. He did not invent the steamboat, which had been built in the early 1700's, but rather applied his engineering skills to their design. He changed the proportions, arrangements, and velocities of already proposed ideas. In 1807, work was completed on the Clermont, the first steamboat that was truly successful, and the culmination of many years of work. It's maiden voyage was on 17 Aug from New York City to Albany, a distance of 150 miles completed in 32 hours. A mechanical genius with many talents, he also designed a system of inland waterways, a submarine (Nautilus, 1801), and a steam warship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fulton
1777 Nathaniel Herbert Claiborne (d 1859) nineteenth century politician from Virginia. He was the brother of William Charles Cole Claiborne, the nephew of Thomas Claiborne, the uncle of John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne and the great-great-great granduncle Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs and Claiborne de Borda Pell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Herbert_Claiborne
1828 James Birdseye McPherson (d 1864) career United States Army officer who served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was killed at the Battle of Atlanta and was the highest ranking Union officer killed during the war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Birdseye_McPherson
1861 Frederick Jackson Turner (d 1932) American historian in the early 20th century. He is best known for his book, The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
1863 Leo Hendrik Baekeland (d 1944) Belgian-born U.S. industrial chemist who invented the first thermosetting plastic, Bakelite, that did not soften when heated. His first successful invention was Velox (in the 1890's), a photographic paper that could be used with artificial light rather than sunlight, which he sold in1899 to George Eastman for $1 million. He then experimented to find a synthetic substitute for shellac, a useful insulator of wires in electric coils. Eventually, he was able to control heat and pressure for a formaldehyde-phenol reaction. By 1909, he displayed the world's first fully synthetic plastic, which could be used not only for insulators, but moulded into buttons, knobs and countless other items. With this patented product, he helped found the modern plastics industry.
1865 Walter Jackson Freeman II, M.D. (d 1972) American physician who specialized in lobotomy. He was a member of the American Psychiatric Association.
1867 Anna Magdalena Meyer (nee Plehn), hymn translator, was born in Alt-Rüdnitz, Neumark, Germany. Her father was a teacher in Germany who emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1869, studied at the Missouri Synod’s practical seminary in Saint Louis and entered the ministry in 1871, serving for twenty-two years at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Anna grew up and was educated at Chippewa Falls and taught school for several years. She married Pastor Christian Meyer of Howard, South Dakota, in 1893. She wrote several original poems and translations from the German that were published in church periodicals. [The Handbook to the Lutheran Hymnal, comp. W. G. Polack (Saint Louis: CPH, 1942): 545]
1891 Sir Frederick Grant Banting (d 1941) Canadian physician who, assisted by Charles H. Best, was the first to extract (1921) the hormone insulin from the pancreas. Injections of insulin proved to be the first effective treatment for diabetes, a disease in which glucose accumulates in abnormally high quantities in the blood. Banting was awarded a share of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for this achievement.
1896 Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower (d 1979) wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and First Lady of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
1900 Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer of concert and film music. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as "the dean of American composers." Copland's music achieved a balance between modern music and American folk styles. The open, slowly changing harmonies of many of his works are said to evoke the vast American landscape. Copland incorporated percussive orchestration, metric changes, polyrhythms, polychords, and tone rows in a broad range of works for the concert hall, theater, ballet and films. In addition to being a composer, Copland was a teacher, lecturer, critic, writer and conductor – generally, but not always, of his own works (Billy the Kid, Appalachian Spring).
1907 Howard William Hunter (d 1995) fourteenth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in 1994 and 1995. His nine month presidential tenure is the shortest in the history of the Church. Hunter was the first president of the LDS Church born in the 20th century.
1908 Harrison Evans Salisbury (d 1993), American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (1955), was the first regular New York Times correspondent in Moscow after World War II
1908 Joseph Raymond McCarthy (d 1957) American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion. He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, McCarthy's tactics and his inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.
1912 Barbara Woolworth Hutton (d 1979) American socialite dubbed by the media as the "Poor Little Rich Girl" because of her troubled life. She donated Winfield House to the United States government, to be used as the residence of the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, in a symbolic $1 transaction following World War II.
1916 Sherwood Charles Schwartz American television producer. He worked on radio shows in the 1940s, and created the television series Gilligan's Island on CBS and The Brady Bunch on ABC. On March 7, 2008, Schwartz, still active in his 90s, was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
1921 Brian Keith (d 1997) American film, television, and stage actor, who in his four decade-long career gained recognition for his work in movies such as the 1961 Disney film, The Parent Trap, the 1966 movie, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, and the 1975 movie, The Wind and the Lion. On television, two of his best known roles were that of a widowed uncle turned bachelor, Bill Davis, in the 1960s sitcom, Family Affair, and the title character of a tough judge in the 1980s drama Hardcastle and McCormick.
1929 James Anthony Piersall former center fielder in Major League Baseball. Between 1950 and 1967, he played for the Boston Red Sox (1950, 1952-58), Cleveland Indians (1959-61), Washington Senators (1962-63), New York Mets (1963), and Los Angeles/California Angels (1963-67). While he had a fairly good professional career as a center fielder, Piersall is better known for his well-publicized battle with bipolar disorder that became the subject of the book and movie Fear Strikes Out.
1930 Edward H. White, II (d 1967) First U.S. astronaut to walk in space. With James A. McDivitt he manned the four-day orbital flight of Gemini 4, launched on 3 Jun 1965. During the third orbit White emerged from the spacecraft, floated in space for about 20 minutes, and became the first person to propel himself in space with a maneuvering unit. Two years later, White was one of the three-man crew of Apollo 1 who in 1967 were the first casualties of the U.S. space program, killed during a flight simulation (the others were Virgil I. Grissom and Roger B. Chaffee).
1933 Fred Wallace Haise, Jr, engineer and former NASA astronaut. He is one of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon. Haise was born in Biloxi, Mississippi. He attended Biloxi High School and Perkinston Junior College (now Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College). He graduated with honors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1959. He completed post-graduate courses at the USAF Aerospace Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1964 and the Harvard Business School PMD Program in 1972.
1938 Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos ) American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Several years prior, two Carlos compositions using classical (pre-Moog) electronic techniques had been issued on LP (Variations for Flute and Tape and Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers). Although the first Carlos Moog albums were interpretations of the works of classical composers, she later resumed releasing original compositions.
1947 Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He is known in the United Kingdom as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s. He is the author of 16 books, of which his latest, Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards, was released in September 2010. This was preceded in 2009 by Driving Like Crazy. According to a 60 Minutes profile, he is also the most quoted living man in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations. He is considered a libertarian, and is often quoted by libertarian and antisocialist writers and pundits.
1948 Charles, Prince of Wales
1954 Condoleezza Rice American professor, politician, diplomat and author. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, and was the second person to hold that office in the administration of President George W. Bush. Rice was the first African-American woman secretary of state, as well as the second African American (after Colin Powell), and the second woman (after Madeleine Albright). Rice was President Bush's National Security Advisor during his first term. Before joining the Bush administration, she was a professor of political science at Stanford University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999. Rice served as the Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification.
1964 Bill Hemmer (born William George Hemmer, American television news anchor. He is a co-host of America's Newsroom on the Fox News Channel.[
1966 Curtis Montague Schilling, Anchorage, Alaska, former American Major League Baseball right-handed pitcher. He helped lead the Philadelphia Phillies to the World Series in 1993 and has won World Series championships in 2001 with the Arizona Diamondbacks and in 2004 and 2007 with the Boston Red Sox. Schilling retired with a career postseason record of 11–2, which is equivalent to a .846 postseason winning percentage, a major-league record among pitchers with at least 10 decisions
Deaths
1831 Georg W. F. Hegel (b. 27 Aug 1770), German philosopher
1832 Charles Carroll of Carrollton (b 19 Sep 1737) wealthy Maryland planter and an early advocate of independence from Great Britain. He served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and later as United States Senator for Maryland. He was the only Catholic and the longest-lived (and last surviving) signatory of the Declaration of Independence, dying at the age of 95.
1902 Thomas Theron Alexander, in Honolulu, Japan missionary and theology professor, (b. 8 Oct 1850).
1914 Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915. He was representative of the last generation of black leaders born in slavery and spoke on behalf of blacks living in the South. Washington was able throughout the final 25 years of his life to maintain his standing as the major black leader because of the sponsorship by powerful whites, substantial support within the black community, his ability to raise educational funds from both groups, and his accommodation to the social realities of the age of Jim Crow segregation.
1916 Henry George, Jr. (b 1862) United States Representative from New York and son of American political economist Henry George (1839–1897).
1972 Martin Dies, Jr. (b 1900) Texas politician and a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives. His father, Martin Dies, was also a member of the United States House of Representatives.
1990 Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (b 1903) was an English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. During World War II, he was a soldier and a spy. He is credited with popularising Mother Teresa and in his later years became a Catholic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Malcolm_Muggeridge
Havasupai Cliff Dwelling
1996 Elman Rogers Service (b 1915) American anthropological theorist and formulator of the nomenclature now in standard use to categorize primitive societies as bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Although widely accepted, the system was abandoned by Service himself because his subsequent research made him question the accuracy of the terminology. Service did fieldwork among the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon and in Paraguay and Mexico. His principal theoretical interests were in kinship, cultural evolution, theories of culture and the evolution of political institutions. His principal ethnographic contribution was Tobati: Paraguayan Town (1954), written with his wife Helen.
1997 George Edward Arcaro (b 1916), known professionally as Eddie Arcaro, was an American Thoroughbred horse racing Hall of Fame jockey who won more American Classic Races than any other jockey in history and is the only rider to have won the U.S. Triple Crown twice. He is widely regarded as the greatest jockey in the history of American Thoroughbred horse racing.
2000 Robert (Bob) Trout (b 1909) American broadcast news reporter, best known for his radio work before and during World War II. He became known to some as the "Iron Man of Radio" for his ability to ad lib while on the air, as well as his stamina, composure, and elocution.
2006 Sumner Shapiro (b 1926) United States Navy Rear Admiral who served as Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence from 1978 to 1982.
Christian Feast Day
Barlaam of Kiev Philip the Apostle (Eastern Orthodox Church) Serapion of Algiers
(Nov 15) Some of the events are so labled because I inadvertently worked off a display of the wrong day and these events actually happened on November 15. Sorry.
![[Home]](http://images.proboards.com/menu/home.gif "[Home]")
![[New Topics]](http://images.proboards.com/menu/topics.png "[New Topics]")
![[Help]](http://images.proboards.com/menu/help.gif "[Help]")
![[Search]](http://images.proboards.com/menu/search.gif "[Search]")
![[Login]](http://images.proboards.com/menu/login.gif "[Login]")
![[Register]](http://images.proboards.com/menu/register.gif "[Register]")
![[Search This Thread]](http://images.proboards.com/search2.gif "[Search This Thread]")
![[Share Topic]](http://images.proboards.com/new/buttons/share.png "[Share Topic]")
![[Print]](http://images.proboards.com/buttons/print.gif "[Print]")
Author
![[avatar]](http://img1.jurko.net/avatar_5803.jpg "[avatar]"){kind=avatar}
![[image]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/BenFranklinDuplessis.jpg/220px-BenFranklinDuplessis.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://www.todayinsci.com/E/Ely_Eugene/ElyEugeneThm.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://www.amug.org/~jpaul/images/days/nov15/1957abel.jpg "[image]")
Logged![[image]](http://www.todayinsci.com/F/Fulton_Robert/FultonRobertThm.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/Jacob_Abbott.jpg/220px-Jacob_Abbott.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/Brady-GeneralMcPherson.jpg/220px-Brady-GeneralMcPherson.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://www.todayinsci.com/B/Banting_Frederick/BantingFrederickThm.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://www.todayinsci.com/W/White_Edward/WhiteEdwardWalkThm.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://www.cyberhymnal.org/img/h/a/harrington_kp.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/ef/John_Mack_Brown.jpg/220px-John_Mack_Brown.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/be/Malcolm_muggeridge.jpg/240px-Malcolm_muggeridge.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://www.todayinsci.com/Events/Anthropology/HavasupaiCliffDwellThm.jpg "[image]")