Today in History, 11/21

1272: Following Henry III of England's death on November 16, his son Prince Edward becomes King of England.
1620: Plymouth Colony settlers sign the Mayflower Compact1783: In Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis d'Arlandes, make the first untethered hot air balloon flight.1789: North Carolina ratifies the United States Constitution and is admitted as the 12th U.S. state.
1791: Colonel Napoléon Bonaparte is promoted to full general and appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic.
1861: Confederate President Jefferson Davis appoints Judah Benjamin Secretary of War.1877: Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.
1894: The Port Arthur Massacre takes place as Port Arthur, Manchuria falls to the Japanese, a decisive victory of the First Sino-Japanese War.
1916: HMHS Britannic sinks in the Aegean Sea after a mine explodes, killing 30 people.1919: Steve Brodie is born. He appeared in the MST3K episodes The Giant Spider Invasion and The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman.
1920: Bloody Sunday occurs during the Anglo-Irish War.
1942: The Alcan Highway is completed.
1944: Harold Ramis is born.

1944: Goldie Hawn is born.1953: Authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce that the "Piltdown Man" skull, held to be one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, is a hoax.
1964: The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opens to traffic (at the time it was the world's longest suspension bridge).
1965: Björk is born.

1965: Alexander Siddig is born. He played the brash, naive Doctor Julian Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

1973: President Richard Nixon's attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, reveals the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate.
1980: A fire at the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas kills 87 people.
1980: Lake Peigneur drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe was drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole. The resulting whirlpool sucked the drilling platform, several barges, houses and trees thousands of feet, to the bottom of the dissolving salt deposit.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.