1295: The first elected representatives from Lancashire were called to Westminster by King Edward I to attend what later became known as "The Model Parliament". 1701: Andres Celsius is born. He invented the temperature scale that bears his name.1703: The first Eddystone Lighthouse is destroyed in the Great Storm of 1703.1901: U.S. Army War College is established. 1910: New York's Pennsylvania Station opens.1924: In New York City, the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is held. 1934: Bank robber Baby Face Nelson dies in a shoot-out with the FBI.1940: Bruce Lee is born. 1942: At Toulon, the French navy scuttles its ships and submarines to keep them out of Nazi hands. 1942: Jimi Hendrix is born. 1953: Curtis Armstrong is born.1954: Patricia McPherson is born. She played the lovely mechanic Bonnie Barstow on Knight Rider.1954: Kimmy Robertson is born. 1955: Bill Nye, science guy, is born. 1966: Andy Merrill is born. He provides the voice of Brak on The Brak Show. 1973: The Senate votes 92-3 to confirm Gerald R. Ford as vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew, who had resigned.
1476: Vlad "The Impaler" Dracula defeats Basarab Laiota with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Bathory and becomes the ruler of Wallachia for the third time. I bet he relaxed afterwards by having somebody impaled. 1778: In the Hawaiian Islands, Captain James Cook becomes the first European to visit Maui. 1789: A national Thanksgiving Day is observed in the United States as recommended by President George Washington and approved by Congress. 1910: Cyril Cusack is born. He was in dozens of movies, but I remember him as the duplicitous Charrington in the 1984 version of Nineteen Eighty Four. 1922: Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first people to enter the tomb of Egyptian King Tutankhamun in over 3000 years. 1922: Charles M. Schulz is born.1933: Robert Goulet is born. 1938: Rich Little is born. 1939: Tina Turner is born. 1942: President Roosevelt orders nationwide gasoline rationing, beginning December 1 The A sticker is lowest priority and gets you 3-4 gallons a week. Yikes! The B sticker was issued to workers in war-related industry. They got 8 gallons a week. C stickers were given to those deemed "essential" to the war effort, like doctors. T stickers were for truckers. Finally the S (or sometimes X) sticker was for high priority people like police and civil defense workers. They got unlimited supplies. A minor scandal broke out when 200 Congressmen mysteriously wound up with X stickers. 1942: Casablanca has its world premiere in New York City. 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.
1120: The White Ship sinks in the English Channel, drowning William Adelin, son of Henry I of England. 1177: The siege of Granada, last Moorish stronghold in Spain, begins. 1542: Battle of Solway Moss. The English army defeats the Scots. 1703: The Great Storm of 1703, the greatest windstorm ever recorded in the southern part of Great Britain, reaches its peak intensity which it maintains through November 27. Winds gust up to 120 mph, and 9,000 people perish in the mighty gale. 1758: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is founded. 1783: The last British troops leave New York City three months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. 1835: Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist who led the expansion of the American steel industry, is born.1846: Carrie Nation, temperance advocate, is born.1864: A group of Confederate operatives calling themselves the Confederate Army of Manhattan starts fires in more than 20 locations in an unsuccessful attempt to burn down New York City. 1867: Alfred Nobel patents dynamite. 1874: The United States Greenback Party is established as a political party consisting primarily of farmers affected by the Panic of 1873. 1876: In retaliation for the American defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, United States Army troops sack Chief Dull Knife's sleeping Cheyenne village at the headwaters of the Powder River. 1914: Joe DiMaggio is born.1920: Ricardo Montalban is born.1926: Jeffery Hunter is born. He played Captian Christopher Pike in the first pilot of Star Trek. 1940: First flight of the deHavilland Mosquito and Martin B-26 Marauder.1941: Percy Sledge is born. 1944: A German V-2 rocket hits a Woolworth's store in Deptford, United Kingdom, killing 160 shoppers. 1944: Ben Stein is born. 1947: John Larroquette is born. 1947: Tracy Walter is born. 1950: The "Storm of the Century", a violent snowstorm, paralyzes the northeastern United States and the Appalachians, bringing winds up to 100 mph and sub-zero temperatures. Pickens, West Virginia, records 57 inches of snow. 323 people die due to the storm. 1950: The People's Republic of China joins the Korean War, sending thousands of troops across the Yalu river border to fight United Nations forces. 1963: President John F. Kennedy is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.1971: Christina Applegate is born. She played the easy sister on Married With Children. 1984: 36 top musicians gather in a Notting Hill studio and record Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas in order to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. 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.
1784: Zachary Taylor, 12th President of the United States is born.1853: Bat Masterson, gunfighter, is born.1859: Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. 1863: The Battle of Lookout Mountain takes place near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant capture Lookout Mountain and begin to break the Confederate siege of the city led by General Braxton Bragg. 1916: Forry Ackerman is born. He is the founder of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and runs a massive museum in Hollywood. Giving him a walk on part is almost required for low-budget B monster pictures.1916: Irwin Allen, creator of the modern disaster picture is born. Here's the trailer for The Towering Inferno. 1925: Conservative lion, William F. Buckley, Jr. is born.1932: In Washington, D.C., the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (better known as the FBI Crime Lab) officially opens. 1941: Pete Best is born.1942: Billy Connolly is born. 1947: Dwight Schultz is born. He played "Howlin' Mad" Murdock on The A-Team and the solcially awkard Lt. Reginald Barclay on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I always liked Barclay, because he wasn't one of these perfect 24th Century Star Trek characters. 1957: Denise Crosby is born. She played the doomed Lt. Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation. 1960: Amanda Wyss is born. She played Beth, the cheatin' girlfriend in the movie Better Off Dead and also Woody's Indiana girlfriend on Cheers. 1963: Lee Harvey Oswald is assassinated by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters on live television. 1971: During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (AKA D.B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money - neither he nor the money have ever been found. 1978: Katherine Heigl is born.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.
1499: Pretender to the throne Perkin Warbeck is hanged for attempting to escape from the Tower of London. He had invaded England in 1497, claiming to be the lost son of King Edward IV of England.1644: Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship, and written by John Milton is published. 1804: Franklin Pierce, 14th President of the United States, is born. 1859: Billy the Kid is born. 1869: In Dumbarton, Scotland, the clipper Cutty Sark is launched - one of the last clippers ever to be built, and the only one still surviving to this day. It recently suffered a massive fire because the security guards were forging their log books and left a shop vac running for 48 hours. Nice job, guys.1876: Corrupt Tammany Hall leader William Marcy Tweed (better known as Boss Tweed) is delivered to authorities in New York City after being captured in Spain.1887: Boris Karloff is born.1888: Harpo Marx is born. 1889: The first jukebox goes into operation at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. 1912: George O'Hanlon is born. He provided the voice of George Jetson. 1914: Michael Gough is born. He was in a ton of the trashy Hammer horror films and played Alfred the butler in all four of the original Batman movies.1936: The first edition of Life is published. 1944: Joe Eszterhas is born. His trashy movies (like Showgirls and Basic Instinct) make Joe D'Amato (Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals and Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade) look like John Ford.1951: David Rappaport is born. He was the Billy Barty of the modern age.1954: For the first time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above the peak it reached just before the 1929 crash. 1963: One of the greatest shows ever, Doctor Who is first broadcast. 1979: In Dublin, Ireland, Irish Republican Army member Thomas McMahon is sentenced to life in prison for the assassination of Lord Mountbatten.
845: The first King of all Brittany, Nominoe defeats the Frankish king Charles the Bald at the Battle of Ballon near Redon. 1718: Off the coast of North Carolina, British pirate Edward Teach (best known as "Blackbeard") is killed in battle with a boarding party led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard.1864: Confederate General John Bell Hood invades Tennessee in an unsuccessful attempt to draw Union General William T. Sherman from Georgia.1890: Charles de Gaulle is born.1898: Wiley Post, aviation pioneer, is born.1906: The SOS distress signal is adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin. 1921: Rodney Dangerfield is born. 1932: Robert Vaughn is born. He is most famous for playing The Man From UNCLE, but he was also in the MST3K episode Teenage Cavemen. 1935: The China Clipper takes off from Alameda, California in an attempt to deliver the first airmail cargo across the Pacific Ocean (the airplane later reached its destination, Manila, and delivered over 110,000 pieces of mail).1940: Terry Gilliam is born. 1943: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek meet in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss ways to defeat Japan. 1943: Billie Jean King is born.1958: Jamie Lee Curtis is born.1960: Bruce Payne is born. He played the blue-lipped bad guy Damodar in that terrible Dungeons & Dragons movie. 1963: In Dallas, Texas, US President John F. Kennedy is killed and Texas Governor John B. Connally is seriously wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald. That same day, US Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the 36th President of the United States. You can watch the Zapruder film here.1968: The Beatles' White Album is released. 1972: The United States loses its first B-52 Stratofortress of the Vietnam War. 1977: The first three nodes of the ARPAnet are connected, in what would eventually become the Internet.
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.
1789: New Jersey becomes the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights. 1820: An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story). 1925: Robert F. Kennedy is born.1932: Richard Dawson is born. 1939: Dickie Smothers is born. 1943: The Battle of Tarawa begins. United States Marines land on Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands and suffer heavy fire from Japanese shore guns and machine guns. 1947: Joe Walsh is born. 1947: The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.1959: Bo Derek is born. She never really did anything for me - I keep expecting to peel off her face and start munching a rat. But she has starred in some of the classic bad movies of all time, like Tarzan the Ape Man and Bolero.1959: Sean Young is born.1962: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation. 1969: The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. 1975: Francisco Franco, Caudillo of Spain dies after 36 years in power. 1984: SETI is founded. 1985: Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released. 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.
1703: The first Eddystone Lighthouse is destroyed in the Great Storm of 1703.
1901: U.S. Army War College is established.
1924: In New York City, the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is held.
1940: Bruce Lee is born.
1954: Patricia McPherson is born. She played the lovely mechanic Bonnie Barstow on Knight Rider.
1954: Kimmy Robertson is born.
