November 14th
 

In 1973 Bobby Moore made his 108th, and final, appearance for the England football team. The team lost 1-0 to Italy at Wembley.


Leo (Hendrik) Baekeland, the chemist who invented the first commercial plastic, named Bakelite in his honour, was born in Belgium in 1863.


In 1889, reporter Nellie Bly set out from New York and travelled by sea, horse, rail & road, to beat Phileas Fogg's 80-day, round-the-world trip........by a week!

November 15th
 

General William Tecumsa Sherman burned the Confederate city of Atlanta to the ground today in 1864


^^^
This was also the start of the General's infamous march, with 60,000 men, from Atlanta to Savannah, during which he destroyed all the towns and farms along the 300-mile route to the sea.


The S.S. St. Paul became the first ship to receive radio messages, transmitted from the Needles wireless station off the Isle of Wight, today in 1899.


In 1983, John Prescott M.P. swam along the River Thames from Chelsea Bridge to Westminster in protest at the dumping of nuclear waste in the sea. (Have to say, I can't see him doing that NOW!!)

On Nov. 15, 1969, a quarter of a million protesters staged a peaceful demonstration in Washington, D.C., against the Vietnam War.

1983 Margaret Trudeau files for divorce from Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau; granted April 2, 1984.

1885 Louis Riel hanged in Mounted Police barracks in Regina; before dying, he gives exclusive interview to journalist Nicholas Flood Davin, who entered prison disguised as a priest. Just after eight in the morning, the hangman appears in the doorway of his cell; Riel asks, 'Mr. Gibson, you want me? I am ready'; after receiving absolution from the priest, he ascends the scaffold; as he and the priest are reciting the words of the Lord's Prayer, the trap door drops.

1973 President Nixon told an Associated Press managing editors meeting in Orlando, Fla., that "people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook."

1869 Suez Canal opens
The Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean and the Red seas, is inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony attended by French Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III.

1558 Elizabethan Age begins
Queen Mary I, the monarch of England and Ireland since 1553, dies and is succeeded by her 25-year-old half-sister, Elizabeth.

November 17th
 

November 16th

Jack Sheppard, a highwayman who had escaped execution on four separate occasions, was finally hanged today in 1724

That one kinda "tickled" me, so I thought I'd post it anyway!


On to today...........

In 1944 a quacking duck alerted the city of Freiburg, Germany, to an air-raid. A statue was later built in it's honour!!


In 1964 General Nasser became Egypt's head of state as the high-living King Farouk departed rapidly into exile


The first international cycle road race - 83 miles from Paris to Rouen - was won in 1869, by Britain's James Moore


Louis XVIII of France, born in 1755, came to power after the fall of Napoleon, and was so overwrought he initiated the custom of leaving one's bottom waistcoat button undone

1976 ~ Spain's parliament approved a bill to establish a democracy after 37 years of dictatorship.

November 18th
 

After a huge Asthma attack, "Four Weddings & a Funeral" star Charlotte Coleman was found dead in 2001


In 1916, General Douglas Haig finally called off the Somme offensive after five months of highly costly battle (in money AND lives!) had failed to make any headway against the Germans


Photography pioneer Louis Dagueere, born in 1789, developed the daguerreotype, a one-off picture without a negative, when he accidentally spilt iodine on some silvered plates


Roman emperor Vespassian, boorn in 9 A.D., raised the mpney for his campaigns in Wales & north Britain by levying a tax on public urinals!!

1863, President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address as he dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania.

November 19th
 

Today in 1600, King Charles I was executed at Runnymede by order of Oliver Cromwell's Parliament


This day in 1703 a mysterious man died in the Bastille in Paris, his head encased in a mask of velvet & whalebone. He would later become known as "The Man In The Iron Mask"


In 1951 the Football Association reluctantly agreed to give official sanction to the use of the new, White footballs


A third attempt by the U.S. to invade Canada during The War of 1812 collapsed in ignominy when the American troops refused to leave New York State!

Those stubborn Americans! :)

1976 Gordon Lightfoot's 'The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald' peaks at #2 on the Billboard pop single chart.

1964 Mt. Kennedy named in memory of late U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy; unnamed mountain on Alaska-Yukon border

November 20th
 

In 1945, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials began; twenty top Nazis went before the judges ~ half of them were excuted for their Crimes


In 1944 the neon advertising lights of London's Piccadilly Circus and the Strand were switched on again, after FIVE years of blackout!


When Princess Elizabeth married Lt. Philip Mountbatten RN in Westminster Abbey in 1947, the BBC made the first-ever telerecording for broadcast in the U.S. 32 hours later


AListair Cooke, the U.S.-based broadcaster who began his famous Letter From America on BBC radio in 1938, was born "Alfred Cooke" in Britain today in 1908

November 21st
 

(Where'd ya get to today Steph?!?! :) )


In 1906, an unnamed man was killed when 200,000 gallons of hot whisky burst from vats in a Glasgow distillery!


In 1987 Demi Moore and Bruce Willis married after knowing each other for just three months. Three children and eleven years later, they divorced in 1998


Cole Porter's "Anything Goes", with words by Guy Bolton & P.G. Wodehouse, had it's first performance today in 1934. It also, incidentally, made Ethel Merman a Star!


Harry Bidwen of Brighton divorced his wife in 1980, at the age of 101, having waited 'til ALL their children were dead!!!

November 22nd
 

!Hey STEPH.... where'd you get to hon?!?! :)

FYI: One of my "sources" for these ramblings has dried up, so I've had to find an alternative! From now on, there will probably be a few more each day than there were!

INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence hanged himself in a Sydney hotel in 1997, in an (alleged) act of autoeroticsim.


In 1497 Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama became the first navigator to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in his search for a sea route to India


Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard the pirate, was killed off the east coast of North America today in 1718


Mount St. Helens in Washington state erupted in 1842. Ash fallout reached as far as 48 mi away Not for the first time.....nor the last!! :)


Today in 1943,President Franklin Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo to discuss measures for defeating Japan.



1963 - President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas Somehow, it doesn't SEEM 40 years ago..... and I'M only 41

November 23rd
 

Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, Connecticut, became thr fifth anthrax fatality in 2001's still unexplained postal attacks.


The first jukebox was installed at the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco today in 1889


The first issue of Life magazine hit the newsstands in 1936. The cover photograph, by Margaret Bourke-White, featured the Fort Peck Dam.


On this day in 1945, U.S. wartime food rationing, of meat, butter, and other foods, ended


In 1971 the People's Republic of China was seated at the UN Security Council for the first time