Mark Twain, photographed by A.F. Bradley, NY

• 1782 – The United States and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, ending the Revolutionary War
• 1835 – Author Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, MO
• 1939 – USSR attacked Finland
• 1966 – The former British colony of Barbados became independent
• 1979 – The album “The Wall” by Pink Floyd was released
• 1995 – President Bill Clinton became the first U.S. chief executive to visit Northern Ireland
• 1999 – The opening of a 135-nation trade gathering in Seattle was disrupted by at least 40,000 demonstrators, some of whom clashed with police
• 2010 – Pentagon leaders called for scrapping the 17-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban after releasing a survey about the prospect of openly gay troops
• 2011 – Mass strikes began across the UK, with up to 2 million workers from schools, hospitals and police stations walking off in protest to proposed pension reforms

Statue of C.S. Lewis looking into a wardrobe. Entitled "The Searcher" by Ross Wilson.

• 1832 – American writer Louisa May Alcott was born
• 1898 – C. S. Lewis, English writer, was born
• 1924 – Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels
• 1947 – U.N. voted for partition of Palestine
• 1963 – U.S. President LBJ formed a commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination
• 2009 – Iran approved plans to build 10 industrial scale uranium enrichment facilities in defiance of U.N. demands it halt enrichment
• 2011 – Anders Behring Breivik, responsible for murdering 77 people in Norway in July, was declared a paranoid schizophrenic by psychiatrists

William Blake in an 1807, portrait by Thomas Phillips

• 1520 – Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan entered the Pacific Ocean with three ships, becoming the first European explorer to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic
• 1582 – William Shakespeare, 18, married and Anne Hathaway, 26
• 1757 – William Blake, English poet and painter was born
• 1943 – President Roosevelt, British PM Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin met in Tehran during WWII
• 1954 – Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, the first man to create and control a nuclear chain reaction, and one of the Manhattan Project scientists, died in Chicago at the age of 53
• 1964 – President Lyndon Johnson’s top advisers and other members of the National Security Council recommended that the president adopt a plan for a two-stage escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam
• 2011 – Egyptians streamed into polling places to vote in the first election since a revolt that toppled one of the world’s longest-serving rulers, Hosni Mubarak

The Fobos-Grunt spacecraft sitting on top of its main propulsion unit (MDU) during pre-launch processing in Baikonur Cosmodrome

• 1887 – ‘Bloody Sunday’ in England
• 1889 – The jukebox made its debut, at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco
• 1936 – First issue of “Life” magazine was published
• 1940 – Romania became an Axis “power”
• 1971 – The People’s Republic of China was seated in the U.N. Security Council
• 1981 – U.S. President Reagan gave authority to the CIA to establish the Contras
• 2003 – Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as president of Georgia in the face of protests
• 2010 – North and South Korean forces traded fire on Tuesday, leaving two South Korean marines dead
• 2011 – Contact was finally made with Russia’s stranded Phobos-Grunt probe that was launched for a Mars mission by the Russians and stranded in Earth’s orbit since its launch on Nov. 9

Blackbeard the Pirate: this was published in Defoe, Daniel; Johnson, Charles (1736) "Capt. Teach alias Black-Beard"

• 1718 – English pirate Edward Teach – better known as “Blackbeard” – was killed during a battle off the Virginia coast
• 1906 – The SOS distress signal was adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin
• 1967 – The UN Security Council approved Resolution 242, which called for Israel to withdraw from territories it captured in 1967, and implicitly called on adversaries to recognize Israel’s right to exist
• 1968 – The Beatles’ “White Album” was released
• 1975 – Juan Carlos was proclaimed king of Spain
• 1998 – “60 Minutes” aired video of Dr. Jack Kevorkian administering lethal drugs to a terminally ill patient
• 2004 – Tens of thousands of demonstrators jammed downtown Kiev, denouncing Ukraine’s presidential runoff election as fraudulent and chanting the name of reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko
• 2011 – A day after the United States, Britain and Canada announced tougher sanctions against Iran as a response to the country’s suspected nuclear weapons program, the Russian Foreign Ministry called the measures “unacceptable and against international law”

Mariano Rajoy in Bilbao

• 1973 – President Richard Nixon’s attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate
• 1989 – The proceedings of Britain’s House of Commons were televised live for the first time
• 2000 – The Florida Supreme Court granted Democrat Al Gore’s request to keep the presidential election recount going
• 2002 – NATO invited seven former communist countries to join the alliance: Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria
• 2005 – Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon broke away from the hardline Likud with the intention of forming a new party
• 2007 – Officials announced the recall of more than a half-million pieces of Chinese-made children’s jewelry contaminated with lead.
• 2010 – Debt-struck Ireland formally applied for a massive EU-IMF loan to stem the flight of capital from its banks
• 2011 – Spain’s Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy, who led his party to victory in the general election on Saturday, promised “no miracles” and a search for solutions for the country’s debt crisis

NASA image of the Suez Canal, taken by MISR satellite on January 30, 2001

• 1292 – King John Balliol of Scotland acceded to the throne
• 1558 – Queen Elizabeth I of England inherited the throne, Elizabethan Age began
• 1839 – Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio, debuted in Milan
• 1869 – The Suez Canal opened in Egypt, linking the Mediterranean and the Red seas
• 1973 – Nixon insisted that he’s not a crook
• 1998 – Brand-new DaimlerChrysler began trading its shares on the New York Stock Exchange
• 2003 – “The Terminator” became “The Governator” of California
• 2008 – The vampire romance movie “Twilight” premiered in Los Angeles
• 2011 – With a week left before the Nov. 23 deadline, the US special joint deficit committee’s talks turn into a blame game, with both sides accusing each other for failure to reach a compromise

Mario Monti, new prime minister of Italy

• 1933 – The United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations
• 1959 – The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music” opened on Broadway
• 1973 – Skylab 4, carrying a crew of three astronauts, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on an 84-day mission
• 1973 – President Richard M. Nixon signed the Alaska Pipeline measure into law
• 1988 – Estonia’s parliament declared the Baltic republic sovereign
• 1995 – US Attorney General Janet Reno disclosed that she had Parkinson’s disease
• 2001 – Investigators found a letter addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., containing anthrax
• 2004 – President George W. Bush picked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state, succeeding Colin Powell
• 2006 – Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman died at age 94
• 2008 – Iraq’s Cabinet overwhelmingly approved a security pact with the United States calling for American forces to remain in the country until 2012
• 2011 – Mario Monti was appointed the new prime minister of Italy, replacing Silvio Berlusconi; Monti will also serve the role of a finance minister

Photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918

· 1777 – The Second Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation, a precursor to the Constitution of the United States

· 1887 – American painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, was born

· 1926 – The National Broadcasting Co. debuted with a radio network of 24 stations

· 1940 – The first 75,000 men were called to armed forces duty under peacetime conscription

· 1984 – An infant who had received a baboon’s heart to replace her own congenitally deformed one died at a California medical center three weeks after the transplant

· 1985 – Britain and Ireland signed an accord giving Dublin an official consultative role in governing Northern Ireland

· 1988 – The Palestine National Council, the legislative body of the PLO, proclaimed the establishment of an independent Palestinian state

· 2002 – Hu Jintao replaced Jiang Zemin as China’s Communist Party leader

· 2005 – Baseball players and owners agreed on a tougher steroids-testing policy

· 2011 – In London, 2012 Olympic Games officials confirmed that ground-to-air missiles will be part of the full range of options available for protecting the event

1892 Illustration from an early edition of Moby-Dick

• 1851 – Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick” was published

• 1922 – The British Broadcasting Corp. began its domestic radio service

• 1935 – US President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine Islands a free commonwealth

• 1969 – Apollo 12 was launched on the second manned mission to the moon

• 1972 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 1,000 for the first time

• 1973 – Britain’s Princess Anne married Capt. Mark Phillips in Westminster Abbey

• 1995 – The U.S. government instituted a partial shutdown, closing national parks and museums while government offices operated with skeleton crews

• 1999 – The United Nations imposed sanctions on Afghanistan for refusing to hand over terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden

• 2011 – Norway’s District Court Judge, Torkjel Nesheim, ruled that there was no reason to believe that mass murder suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, is insane; Breivik stands accused of murdering 77 people this summer