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

Lucas Papademos

• 1483 – Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation, was born in Eisleben, Germany
• 1526 – Voivode Janos Zapolya of Transylvania is elected King of Hungary
• 1775 – The U.S. Marines were organized under authority of the Continental Congress
• 1928 – Hirohito was enthroned as Emperor of Japan
• 1942 – After the recent victory over Rommel at El Alamein, Egypt, British PM Winston Churchill said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
• 1969 – “Sesame Street” debuted on PBS
• 2001 – The World Trade Organization approved China’s membership
• 2007 – Author Norman Mailer died at age 84
• 2011 – Lucas Papademos, a former banker and European Central Bank vice president, has been named interim prime minister of Greece

Interior of Berlin's Fasanenstrasse Synagogueafter it was set on fire during Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938

• 1541 – King Henry VIII’s of England fifth wife, Catherine Howard, is imprisoned on charges of adultery
• 1888 – Jean Monnet, French economist, was born
• 1914 – In the first ever wartime action by an Australian warship, the cruiser Sydney sank the German raider Emden in the Indian Ocean
• 1938 – Nazis launch Kristallnacht – a mass organized attack on Jewish Germans
• 1989 – East German officials opened the Berlin Wall, allowing travel from East to West Berlin. The following day, celebrating Germans began to tear the wall down
• 1965 – An antiwar protestor set himself on fire in front of the U.N. building in NYC
• 2001 – The3,400-seat Kodak Theatre, designed to be the new home of the Academy Awards opened in Hollywood
• 2010 – A Carnival cruise ship, carrying 3,300 passengers, was stranded near Mexico after losing power due to an engine room fire
• 2011 – A winter storm with winds of up to 100 mph is slamming Alaska, creating high seas and blizzard conditions; it would be the equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane in the tropics

Richelieu wing of the Louvre museum

• 1519 – Spanish conquistadors captured the Aztec Emperor Montezuma
• 1793 – The Louvre was opened as a public museum in Paris
• 1847 – Bram Stoker, British author of Dracula, was born
• 1888 – Tiddlywinks patented by Joseph Fincher
• 1895 – X-rays were discovered by German Wilhelm Roentgen
• 1923 – Beer Hall Putsch began – Adolf Hitler’s first attempt to seize control of the German government, began
• 1962 – The famous Ford Rotunda stood in Dearborn, Michigan for the last time: the next day, it was destroyed in a massive fire
• 2000 – A statewide recount of presidential election ballots began in Florida
• 2010 – U.S. President Barack Obama backed a permanent seat for India on the U.N. Security Council
• 2011 – An asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will pass by Earth to within eight-tenths of the distance of the; the closest approach will occur at 6:28 p.m. ET when the asteroid passes within 202,000 miles of our planet

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

• 1893 – Passage of a referendum made Colorado the first state to grant women the right to vote
• 1879 – Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary, was born
• 1911 – Marie Curie became the first multiple Nobel Prize winner when she was given the award for chemistry eight years after garnering the physics prize with her late husband, Pierre. (She remains the only woman with multiple Nobels and the only person to receive the award in two science categories.)
• 1991 – Basketball star Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for the AIDS virus and was retiring
• 2000 – Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, becoming the first first lady to win public office
• 2009 – The Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed, 220-215, landmark health care legislation to expand coverage to tens of millions who lacked it and placed tough new restrictions on the insurance industry
• 2011 – Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi denied rumors that he might resign, after tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Rome to voice opposition to his government and its reforms on Saturday

Hungarians gathered around the head of the destroyed 25-meter statue of Stalin in Budapest

· 1880 – The first cash register was patented by James and John Ritty of Dayton, Ohio

· 1922 – The entrance to King Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered in Egypt

· 1924 – Nellie T. Ross of Wyoming was elected the nation’s first woman governor

· 1939 – The United States modified its neutrality stance in World War II to allow “cash and carry” purchases of arms by belligerents, a policy favoring Britain and France

· 1955 – Baseball Hall of Famer Cy Young died at age 88

· 1956 – Soviet troops moved in to crush a revolt in Hungary

· 1979 – The Iranian hostage crisis began as militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran

· 1995 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist after speaking at a peace rally in Tel Aviv

· 2001 – The first movie based on the best-selling “Harry Potter” books by J.K. Rowling has its world premiere in London

· 2011 – MF Global Holdings chief executive officer, Jon Corzine, has resigned after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday; he is not taking a severance package

Bill Clinton

• 1324 – The first recorded burning of a witch took place in Ireland
• 1534 – The Act of Supremacy made Henry VIII head of the English Church
• 1679 – A comet caused panic across Europe
• 1839 - The first Opium War between China and Britain broke out
• 1903 – Panama declared independence from Colombia
• 1957 – Laika, a Russian dog, becomes the first animal in space
• 1992 – Bill Clinton was elected the 42nd president of the U.S.
• 2010 – GOP soared to a historic victory in the U.S. securing the House and a stronger presence in state offices, but fell short in Senate
• 2011 – The G20 summit in France plans to make the European debt crisis a top priority