Post by farmgal on Nov 13, 2012 11:44:17 GMT -5
November 14 is the 318th day of the year, in the Gregorian calendar.
There are 47 days remaining until the end of the year.
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
1533 Conquistadors from Spain under the leadership of Francisco Pizarro arrive in Cajamarca, Inca empire
1575 The Maulbronn Formula, a precursor of the Formula of Concord, was submitted to the German princes.
1776 The St. James Chronicle of London carries an item announcing "The very identical Dr. Franklyn [Benjamin Franklin], whom Lord Chatham [former leading parliamentarian and colonial supporter William Pitt] so much caressed, and used to say he was proud in calling his friend, is now at the head of the rebellion in North America."
Benjamin Franklin, joint postmaster general of the colonies (1753-1774), and his son William traveled to London together in 1757. There, for the next five years, William studied law, and Franklin studied social climbing. They had remarkable success for a candle-maker's son and his illegitimate progeny. By the end of their sojourn, William had become an attorney and received an honorary Master of Arts from Oxford University, while his father reveled in honorary doctorates from Oxford and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The elder Franklin's plans for his son's advancement succeeded, and his son won the choicest of appointments, a royal governorship, in 1762.
Franklin then accompanied his son from London to Pennsylvania, only to return to London as Pennsylvania's agent in 1764, where he lobbied for the placement of the colony under direct royal control. He soon added Georgia, New Jersey and Massachusetts to the list of colonies for which he served as spokesperson in Parliament.
In 1775, Franklin returned to America as the American Revolution approached; he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and, in 1776, signed the Declaration of Independence. Ironically, his son William came out on the side of the British during the War of Independence and was imprisoned while serving as the Loyalist governor of New Jersey.
1825 The first ship made in the U.S. with sheet iron was tested on the Susquehanna River. Named the Codorus, the vessel was built by Quaker John Elgar at York, Pa. using sheet iron fastened with iron rivets. The ship weighted five tons, of which two tons was for the coal- and wood- fueled boiler which provided power for an 8 h.p. engine. With a keel length of 60-ft and a 9-ft beam, the ship drew about seven inches of water. The next spring, the steamboat performed according to design by completing an upriver trip to Binghamton, N.Y. - the only steamboat to do so. The difficult three-month voyage proved that upstream navigation on the shallow, rock-filled Susquehanna was impractical.
1832 The first street car to be used in the U.S. took its initial trip with municipal officals in New York City. Named the John Mason, after a prominent New York Banker, the carriage was horse-drawn and rode on iron wheels along iron rails laid in the middle of the road. The track ran along Fourth Avenue from Prince Street to 14th Street. The carriage had three non-connecting compartments, each able to carry ten passengers. Public transportation began on 26 Nov 1832 for a fare of 12-1/2 cents. The conveyance was designed and built by John Stephenson in Philadelphia. Although horses had previously been used to haul trains on railroad tracks, this was the first horse-drawn street-car.
1862 American Civil War: President Abraham Lincoln approves General Ambrose Burnside's plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, leading to the Battle of Fredericksburg.
(Nov 15) 1864 Sherman burns Atlantathen moves south, destroying everything in his path in order to punish the Confederates for starting the war. The advocate of a hard, unrelenting war on all fronts "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it," he said, thus solidifying his reputation as the first modern general he then set off on his famous March to the Sea.
1851 Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville about the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, is published by Harper & Brothers in New York. Moby-Dick is now considered a great classic of American literature and contains one of the most famous opening lines in fiction: "Call me Ishmael." Initially, though, the book about Captain Ahab and his quest for a giant white whale was a flop.
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 and as a young man spent time in the merchant marines, the U.S. Navy and on a whaling ship in the South Seas. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, a romantic adventure based on his experiences in Polynesia. The book was a success and a sequel, Omoo, was published in 1847. Three more novels followed, with mixed critical and commercial results. Melville's sixth book, Moby-Dick, was first published in October 1851 in London, in three volumes titled The Whale, and then in the U.S. a month later. Melville had promised his publisher an adventure story similar to his popular earlier works, but instead, Moby-Dick was a tragic epic, influenced in part by Melville's friend and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels include The Scarlet Letter.
After Moby-Dick's disappointing reception, Melville continued to produce novels, short stories (Bartleby) and poetry, but writing wasn't paying the bills so in 1865 he returned to New York to work as a customs inspector, a job he held for 20 years.
Melville died in 1891, largely forgotten by the literary world. By the 1920s, scholars had rediscovered his work, particularly Moby-Dick, which would eventually become a staple of high school reading lists across the United States. Billy Budd, Melville's final novel, was published in 1924, 33 years after his death.
1864 Sherman burns Atlantathen moves south, destroying everything in his path in order to punish the Confederates for starting the war. The advocate of a hard, unrelenting war on all fronts "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it," he said, thus solidifying his reputation as the first modern general he then set off on his famous March to the Sea.
1882 Franklin Leslie kills Billy "The Kid" Claiborne On this day, the gunslinger Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie shoots the Billy "The Kid" Claiborne dead in the streets of Tombstone, Arizona.
The town of Tombstone is best known today as the site of the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral. In the 1880s, however, Tombstone was home to many gunmen who never achieved the enduring fame of Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday. Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie was one of the most notorious of these largely forgotten outlaws.
There are few surviving details about Leslie's early life. At different times, he claimed to have been born in both Texas and Kentucky, to have studied medicine in Europe, and to have been an army scout in the war against the Apache Indians. No evidence has ever emerged to support or conclusively deny these claims. The first historical evidence of Leslie's life emerges in 1877, when he became a scout in Arizona. A few years later, Leslie was attracted to the moneymaking opportunities of the booming mining town of Tombstone, where he opened the Cosmopolitan Hotel in 1880. That same year he killed a man named Mike Killeen during a quarrel over Killeen's wife, and he married the woman shortly thereafter.
Leslie's reputation as a cold-blooded killer brought him trouble after his drinking companion and fellow gunman John Ringo was found dead in July 1882. Some Tombstone citizens, including a young friend of Ringo's named Billy "The Kid" Claiborne, were convinced that Leslie had murdered Ringo, though they could not prove it. Probably seeking vengeance and the notoriety that would come from shooting a famous gunslinger, Claiborne unwisely decided to publicly challenge Leslie, who shot him dead.
The remainder of Leslie's life was equally violent and senseless. After divorcing Killeen in 1887, he took up with a Tombstone prostitute, whom he murdered several years later during a drunken rage. Even by the loose standards of frontier law in Tombstone, the murder of an unarmed woman was unacceptable, and Leslie served nearly 10 years in prison before he was paroled in 1896. After his release, he married again and worked a variety of odd jobs around the West. He reportedly made a small fortune in the gold fields of the Klondike region before he disappeared forever from the historical record.
1889 Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in seventy-two days.
(Nov 15) 1896 Power plant at Niagara Falls begins operation. In 1896, the first long-distance transmission of hydroelectricity from the Niagara Falls Power Company flowed to Buffalo, N.Y., 26 miles away. Although some small-scale use of the water power of the Niagara Falls occurred earlier, this company made the first large-scale utilization for commercial purposes on August 26, 1895, when it began supplying power to an aluminium production plant.
(Nov 15) 1904 A patent was granted to King C. Gillette for a safety 'razor'. In order to apply his idea, Gillette co-founded the American Safety Razor Company on September 28 1901. The company's name was changed in July 1902 to Gillette Safety Razor Company. Gillette obtained a trademark registration for his portrait and signature on the packaging. Production began in 1903 when he sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. The following year, 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades were sold, thanks in part to Gillette's low prices, automated manufacturing techniques, and good advertising.
(Nov 15) 1904 Ethel Barrymore, appearing in the play, "Sunday", first spoke her trademark line. Ethel Barrymore, appearing in the play, "Sunday", spoke the famous line, "That's all there is. There isn't any more," as the curtain fell. Ethel Barrymore was highly regarded as a charming and charismatic stage actress in New York City and a major Broadway performer. Her first appearance in Broadway was in 1901, in a play called Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. She was a great Nora in A Doll's House by Ibsen (1905), and a passionate Juliet in Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare (1922).
1910 The first airplane flight from a ship was made by Eugene Ely from the bow of the scout cruiser Birmingham, anchored at the Hampton Roads Yatch Clubhouse at Willoughby Spit. His runway was 83 feet long, with a five degree slope, but because the plane itself was 57 feet long, the available runway for takeoff was only 26 feet. He then flew through fog and rain to Hampton Rpads, Va. For his effort, he won a $5,000 prize offereed by John Barry Ryan. Ely was a civilian pilot for the Curtiss Aviation Company. The following year, 18 Jan 1911, Ely made another first in history when he landed on he battleship USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay.
1916 Ottoman Empire declares a holy war In Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, the religious leader Sheikh-ul-Islam declares an Islamic holy war on behalf of the Ottoman government, urging his Muslim followers to take up arms against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro in World War I.
By the time the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914, the Ottoman Empire was faltering, having lost much of its once considerable territory in Europe with its defeat in the First Balkan War two years earlier. Seeking to ally themselves with one of the great European powers to help safeguard them against future loss, the ambitious Ottoman leaders--members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), known collectively as the Young Turks--responded favorably to overtures made by Germany in August 1914. Though Germany and Turkey secretly concluded a military alliance on August 2, the Turks did not officially take part in World War I until several months later. On October 29, the Ottoman navy--including two German ships, Goeben and Breslau, which famously eluded the British navy in the first week of the war to reach Constantinople--attacked Russian ports in the Black Sea, marking the beginning of Turkey's participation in the war.
The sheikh's declaration of a holy war, made two weeks later, urged Muslims all over the world--including in the Allied countries--to rise up and defend the Ottoman Empire, as a protector of Islam, against its enemies. "Of those who go to the Jihad for the sake of happiness and salvation of the believers in God's victory," the declaration read, "the lot of those who remain alive is felicity, while the rank of those who depart to the next world is martyrdom. In accordance with God's beautiful promise, those who sacrifice their lives to give life to the truth will have honor in this world, and their latter end is paradise."
(Nov 15) 1920 League of Nations holds first meeting, in Geneva.On Jan 10, the Treaty of Versailles was officially ratified and the League of Nations came into existence. The League Council held its first meeting in Paris on January 16, but moved to Geneva where the Council began meeting in the Palais Wilson, formerly the Hotel National. The Assembly met November 15 in Geneva in the Salle de la Reformation where 41 states signed the charter. Woodrow Wilson had selected Geneva to be the headquarters because Switzerland was a neutral country, more likely to attract additional members.
(Nov 15) 1926 NBC on-air debut with a radio network of 24 stations. As part of the reorganization of the broadcasting assets in the wake of the acquisitions, on September 13, 1926, the formation of the National Broadcasting Company was announced via newspaper advertisements, and on November 15, 1926 NBC's first broadcast was made. This first broadcast on November 15, 1926 marked the de facto formation by NBC of the Red Network from the WEAF network assets, using WEAF as the "key station"; this network in eventual popular image tended to broadcast the most popular entertainment programming.
1940 World War II: In England, the city of Coventry is heavily bombed by German Luftwaffe bombers. Coventry Cathedral is almost completely destroyed.
1941 World War II: The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal sinks due to torpedo damage from U-81 sustained on November 13.
1957 US sentences Soviet spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel to 30 years & $3,000. Indicted as a Russian spy, Colonel Abel was tried in Federal court at New York City during October, 1957. Among the government witnesses to testify against him was his former trusted espionage assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Reino Hayhanen. On October 25, 1957, the jury announced its verdict -- Abel was guilty of all counts. He appeared before Judge Mortimer W. Byers on November 15, 1957, and was sentenced. On February 10, 1962, Rudolf Invanovich Abel was exchanged for the American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who was a prisoner of the Soviet Union.
1957 The Apalachin Meeting outside Binghamton, New York is raided by law enforcement, and many high level Mafia figures are arrested.
1959 On this day in 1959, an article written by Massachusetts senator and presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy appears in an issue of TV Guide. In it, Kennedy examined the influence of television, still a relatively new technology, on American political campaigns.
In the article, Kennedy mused that television had the power to bring political campaigns—and scandals—immediately and directly to the public and illuminated the contrast between political personalities. Kennedy shrewdly noted that a "slick or bombastic orator pounding the table and ringing the rafters" fared poorly against a more congenial candidate and "is not as welcome in the family living room" as a candidate with "honesty, vigor, compassion [and] intelligence." Kennedy strove to convey the latter image. He also compared Woodrow Wilson's 1919 month-long cross-country railroad trek to promote his League of Nations proposal (an exhausting trip that ended when Wilson suffered a stroke) to then-President Eisenhower's ability to reach millions of voters in a 15-minute television appearance.
A year after the publication of the article, Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, faced off in the nation's first-ever televised presidential campaign debates. A master at projecting the quintessential presidential image, Kennedy exhibited a calm demeanor and responded to questions with intelligence and decorum. While Kennedy appeared rested, well-groomed and in control, Nixon appeared flustered and his light beard, or "five-o'clock shadow," created more of a stir than his responses to the moderator's questions. As president, Kennedy continued to showcase his skill at handling the press on-camera and carefully cultivated a relationship with journalists by enlisting their direct involvement in balancing candor with secrecy.
Kennedy's article also addressed the potential perils of marrying mass media to politics. He warned that political campaigns "could be taken over by public relations experts, who tell the candidate not only how to use TV but what to say, what to stand for and what kind of person to be." He cautioned Americans to be vigilant about what they watched, and to be aware that, like game shows, political campaigns "can be fixed...It is in your power to perceive deception, to shut off gimmickry, to reward honesty, to demand legislation where needed." Without the public's acquiescence, he said, "no TV show is worthwhile and no politician can exist."
1964 With the help of a fresh three inch cover of snow, the temperature at Ely, NV, dipped to 15 degrees below zero to establish an all-time record low for the month of November. That record of -15 degrees was later equalled on the 19th of November in 1985. (The Weather Channel)
1965 Vietnam War: The Battle of the Ia Drang begins - the first major engagement between regular American and North Vietnamese forces.
1967 A U.S. patent for "Ruby Laser Systems" was issued to Theodore Maiman (No. 3,353,115), for which he had applied on 13 Apr 1961. He had first operated a laser based on a ruby crystal on 16 May 1960, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
1967 Maj. Gen. Bruno Hochmuth, commander of the 3rd Marine Division, is killed when the helicopter in which he is travelling is shot down. He was the most senior U.S. officer to be killed in action in the war to date.
1969 Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the Moon.
1970 Southern Airways Flight 932 crashes in the mountains near Huntington, West Virginia, killing 75, including members of the Marshall University football team.
1973 In the United Kingdom, Princess Anne marries Captain Mark Phillips, in Westminster Abbey.
1974 A storm produced 15 inches of snow at the Buffalo, NY, airport, and 30 inches on the south shore of Lake Erie. (David Ludlum)
1979 Iran hostage crisis: US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive Order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.
1982 Lech Walêsa, the leader of Poland's outlawed Solidarity movement, is released after eleven months of internment near the Soviet border.
1985 The first discovery of a fullerene was published in the journal Nature. In Sep 1985, the American chemists Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Richard E. Smalley, colleagues at Rice met with Sir Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex, England. In 11 days of research, they discovered the first fullerene, C60, a spherical cluster of carbon atoms. The discovery, dubbed buckminsterfullerene or buckyballs, opened a new branch of chemistry, and all three men were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work.
1986 An early season cold wave set more than 200 records from the northwestern U.S. to the east coast over a seven day period. For some places it proved to be the coldest weather of the winter season. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders - 1987)
1986 Wall Street arbitrageur Ivan Boesky pleads guilty to insider trading and agrees to pay a $100 million fine and cooperate with the Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation. "Boesky Day," as the SEC would later call it, was crucial in exposing a nationwide scandal at the heart of the `80s Wall Street boom. Boesky testified that he had gained his $200 million fortune using illegal inside information about impending mergers to trade stock in the companies involved. As a result of Boesky's confession, subpoenas were issued to some of the world's most famous financiers, including "Junk Bond King" Michael Milken. Boesky's testimony brought Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment banking company, to justice for their participation in the illegal schemes. Milken paid over a billion dollars in fines and restitution and was sentenced to 10 years in prison; two years later his sentence was reduced to time served. In addition to his own financial penalty, Boesky received a three-year sentence, 22 months of which he served at Lompoc Federal Prison in California. Following this insider trading scandal, Congress increased the penalties for securities violations. After prison, Boesky divorced his wife and relocated to La Jolla, California. In contrast to Milken and others involved, Boesky has largely avoided public attention since the scandal, though he has surfaced to testify in still-unresolved legal proceedings. Despite his cooperation with the authorities, Ivan Boesky was demonized as a national symbol of greed and an example of the dangers of `80s-era excess.
1987 The first major snowstorm of the season hit the Southern and Central Rockies, producing 12 inches at the Brian Head ski resort in Utah overnight. Strong and gusty winds associated with the storm reached 52 mph at Ruidoso NM. In the eastern U.S., the temperature at Washington D.C. soared to 68 degrees, just three days after being buried under more than a foot of snow. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1988 A massive storm produced snow and gusty winds in the western U.S., with heavy snow in some of the higher elevations. Winds gusted to 66 mph at Show Low AZ, and Donner Summit, located in the Sierra Nevada Range of California, was buried under 23 inches of snow. Heavy rain soaked parts of California, with 3.19 inches reported at Blue Canyon. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1989 Unseasonably warm weather prevailed east of the Rockies. Temperatures reached 70 degrees as far north as New England, and readings in the 80s were reported across the southeast quarter of the nation. Nineteen cities reported record high temperatures for the date. For the second time in the month Dallas/Fort Worth TX equalled their record for November with an afternoon high of 89 degrees. The high of 91 degrees at Waco TX was their warmest of record for so late in the season. Heavy snow blanketed parts of Wyoming overnight, with a foot of snow reported at Cody, and ten inches at Yellowstone Park. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1991 American and British authorities announce indictments against two Libyan intelligence officials in connection with the downing of the Pan Am Flight 103.
1991 In Royal Oak, Michigan, a fired United States Postal Service employee goes on a shooting rampage, killing four and wounding five before committing suicide.
1995 A budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums and to run most government offices with skeleton staffs.
2002 The United States House of Representatives votes not to create an independent commission to investigate the September 11 attacks.
2003 Astronomers Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz discover 90377 Sedna, a Trans-Neptunian object.
2007 The last direct-current electrical distribution system in the United States is shut down in New York City by Con Edison.
Births
1765 Robert Fulton (d 1815) American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success. He did not invent the steamboat, which had been built in the early 1700's, but rather applied his engineering skills to their design. He changed the proportions, arrangements, and velocities of already proposed ideas. In 1807, work was completed on the Clermont, the first steamboat that was truly successful, and the culmination of many years of work. It's maiden voyage was on 17 Aug from New York City to Albany, a distance of 150 miles completed in 32 hours. A mechanical genius with many talents, he also designed a system of inland waterways, a submarine (Nautilus, 1801), and a steam warship.
1777 Nathaniel Herbert Claiborne (d 1859) nineteenth century politician from Virginia. He was the brother of William Charles Cole Claiborne, the nephew of Thomas Claiborne, the uncle of John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne and the great-great-great granduncle Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs and Claiborne de Borda Pell.
1803 Jacob Abbott (d 1879) American writer of children's books.
1828 James Birdseye McPherson (d 1864) career United States Army officer who served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was killed at the Battle of Atlanta and was the highest ranking Union officer killed during the war.
1861 Frederick Jackson Turner (d 1932) American historian in the early 20th century. He is best known for his book, The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
1863 Leo Hendrik Baekeland (d 1944) Belgian-born U.S. industrial chemist who invented the first thermosetting plastic, Bakelite, that did not soften when heated. His first successful invention was Velox (in the 1890's), a photographic paper that could be used with artificial light rather than sunlight, which he sold in1899 to George Eastman for $1 million. He then experimented to find a synthetic substitute for shellac, a useful insulator of wires in electric coils. Eventually, he was able to control heat and pressure for a formaldehyde-phenol reaction. By 1909, he displayed the world's first fully synthetic plastic, which could be used not only for insulators, but moulded into buttons, knobs and countless other items. With this patented product, he helped found the modern plastics industry.
1865 Walter Jackson Freeman II, M.D. (d 1972) American physician who specialized in lobotomy. He was a member of the American Psychiatric Association.
1891 Sir Frederick Grant Banting (d 1941) Canadian physician who, assisted by Charles H. Best, was the first to extract (1921) the hormone insulin from the pancreas. Injections of insulin proved to be the first effective treatment for diabetes, a disease in which glucose accumulates in abnormally high quantities in the blood. Banting was awarded a share of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for this achievement.
1896 Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower (d 1979) wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and First Lady of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
1900 Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer of concert and film music. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as "the dean of American composers." Copland's music achieved a balance between modern music and American folk styles. The open, slowly changing harmonies of many of his works are said to evoke the vast American landscape. Copland incorporated percussive orchestration, metric changes, polyrhythms, polychords, and tone rows in a broad range of works for the concert hall, theater, ballet and films. In addition to being a composer, Copland was a teacher, lecturer, critic, writer and conductor – generally, but not always, of his own works (Billy the Kid, Appalachian Spring).
1907 Howard William Hunter (d 1995) fourteenth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in 1994 and 1995. His nine month presidential tenure is the shortest in the history of the Church. Hunter was the first president of the LDS Church born in the 20th century.
1908 Harrison Evans Salisbury (d 1993), American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (1955), was the first regular New York Times correspondent in Moscow after World War II
1908 Joseph Raymond McCarthy (d 1957) American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion. He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, McCarthy's tactics and his inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.
1912 Barbara Woolworth Hutton (d 1979) American socialite dubbed by the media as the "Poor Little Rich Girl" because of her troubled life. She donated Winfield House to the United States government, to be used as the residence of the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, in a symbolic $1 transaction following World War II.
1916 Sherwood Charles Schwartz American television producer. He worked on radio shows in the 1940s, and created the television series Gilligan's Island on CBS and The Brady Bunch on ABC. On March 7, 2008, Schwartz, still active in his 90s, was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
1921 Brian Keith (d 1997) American film, television, and stage actor, who in his four decade-long career gained recognition for his work in movies such as the 1961 Disney film, The Parent Trap, the 1966 movie, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, and the 1975 movie, The Wind and the Lion. On television, two of his best known roles were that of a widowed uncle turned bachelor, Bill Davis, in the 1960s sitcom, Family Affair, and the title character of a tough judge in the 1980s drama Hardcastle and McCormick.
1929 James Anthony Piersall former center fielder in Major League Baseball. Between 1950 and 1967, he played for the Boston Red Sox (1950, 1952-58), Cleveland Indians (1959-61), Washington Senators (1962-63), New York Mets (1963), and Los Angeles/California Angels (1963-67). While he had a fairly good professional career as a center fielder, Piersall is better known for his well-publicized battle with bipolar disorder that became the subject of the book and movie Fear Strikes Out.
1930 Edward H. White, II (d 1967) First U.S. astronaut to walk in space. With James A. McDivitt he manned the four-day orbital flight of Gemini 4, launched on 3 Jun 1965. During the third orbit White emerged from the spacecraft, floated in space for about 20 minutes, and became the first person to propel himself in space with a maneuvering unit. Two years later, White was one of the three-man crew of Apollo 1 who in 1967 were the first casualties of the U.S. space program, killed during a flight simulation (the others were Virgil I. Grissom and Roger B. Chaffee).
1933 Fred Wallace Haise, Jr, engineer and former NASA astronaut. He is one of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon. Haise was born in Biloxi, Mississippi. He attended Biloxi High School and Perkinston Junior College (now Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College). He graduated with honors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1959. He completed post-graduate courses at the USAF Aerospace Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1964 and the Harvard Business School PMD Program in 1972.
1938 Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos ) American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Several years prior, two Carlos compositions using classical (pre-Moog) electronic techniques had been issued on LP (Variations for Flute and Tape and Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers). Although the first Carlos Moog albums were interpretations of the works of classical composers, she later resumed releasing original compositions.
1947 Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He is known in the United Kingdom as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s. He is the author of 16 books, of which his latest, Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards, was released in September 2010. This was preceded in 2009 by Driving Like Crazy. According to a 60 Minutes profile, he is also the most quoted living man in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations. He is considered a libertarian, and is often quoted by libertarian and antisocialist writers and pundits.
1948 Charles, Prince of Wales
1954 Condoleezza Rice American professor, politician, diplomat and author. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, and was the second person to hold that office in the administration of President George W. Bush. Rice was the first African-American woman secretary of state, as well as the second African American (after Colin Powell), and the second woman (after Madeleine Albright). Rice was President Bush's National Security Advisor during his first term. Before joining the Bush administration, she was a professor of political science at Stanford University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999. Rice served as the Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification.
1964 Bill Hemmer (born William George Hemmer, American television news anchor. He is a co-host of America's Newsroom on the Fox News Channel.[
1966 Curtis Montague Schilling, Anchorage, Alaska, former American Major League Baseball right-handed pitcher. He helped lead the Philadelphia Phillies to the World Series in 1993 and has won World Series championships in 2001 with the Arizona Diamondbacks and in 2004 and 2007 with the Boston Red Sox. Schilling retired with a career postseason record of 11–2, which is equivalent to a .846 postseason winning percentage, a major-league record among pitchers with at least 10 decisions
Deaths
1832 Charles Carroll of Carrollton (September 19, 1737 – November 14, 1832) was a wealthy Maryland planter and an early advocate of independence from Great Britain. He served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and later as United States Senator for Maryland. He was the only Catholic and the longest-lived (and last surviving) signatory of the Declaration of Independence, dying at the age of 95.
1914 Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915. He was representative of the last generation of black leaders born in slavery and spoke on behalf of blacks living in the South. Washington was able throughout the final 25 years of his life to maintain his standing as the major black leader because of the sponsorship by powerful whites, substantial support within the black community, his ability to raise educational funds from both groups, and his accommodation to the social realities of the age of Jim Crow segregation.
1916 Henry George, Jr. (b 1862) United States Representative from New York and son of American political economist Henry George (1839–1897).
1972 Martin Dies, Jr. (b 1900) Texas politician and a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives. His father, Martin Dies, was also a member of the United States House of Representatives.
1974 Johnny Mack Brown (b 1904) All-American college football player and film actor.
1990 Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (b 1903) was an English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. During World War II, he was a soldier and a spy. He is credited with popularising Mother Teresa and in his later years became a Catholic.
Havasupai Cliff Dwelling1996 Elman Rogers Service (b 1915) American anthropological theorist and formulator of the nomenclature now in standard use to categorize primitive societies as bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Although widely accepted, the system was abandoned by Service himself because his subsequent research made him question the accuracy of the terminology. Service did fieldwork among the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon and in Paraguay and Mexico. His principal theoretical interests were in kinship, cultural evolution, theories of culture and the evolution of political institutions. His principal ethnographic contribution was Tobati: Paraguayan Town (1954), written with his wife Helen.
1997 George Edward Arcaro (b 1916), known professionally as Eddie Arcaro, was an American Thoroughbred horse racing Hall of Fame jockey who won more American Classic Races than any other jockey in history and is the only rider to have won the U.S. Triple Crown twice. He is widely regarded as the greatest jockey in the history of American Thoroughbred horse racing.
2000 Robert (Bob) Trout (b 1909) American broadcast news reporter, best known for his radio work before and during World War II. He became known to some as the "Iron Man of Radio" for his ability to ad lib while on the air, as well as his stamina, composure, and elocution.
2006 Sumner Shapiro (b 1926) United States Navy Rear Admiral who served as Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence from 1978 to 1982.
Christian Feast Day
Barlaam of Kiev
Philip the Apostle (Eastern Orthodox Church)
Serapion of Algiers
(Nov 15) Some of the events are so labled because I inadvertently worked off a display of the wrong day and these events actually happened on November 15. Sorry.
daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
www.todayinsci.com/11/11_14.htm
www.weatherforyou.com/cgi-bin/weather_history/today2S.pl
www.amug.org/~jpaul/nov15.html
www.scopesys.com/cgi-bin/today2.cgi
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/moby-dick-published
There are 47 days remaining until the end of the year.
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
1533 Conquistadors from Spain under the leadership of Francisco Pizarro arrive in Cajamarca, Inca empire
1575 The Maulbronn Formula, a precursor of the Formula of Concord, was submitted to the German princes.
1776 The St. James Chronicle of London carries an item announcing "The very identical Dr. Franklyn [Benjamin Franklin], whom Lord Chatham [former leading parliamentarian and colonial supporter William Pitt] so much caressed, and used to say he was proud in calling his friend, is now at the head of the rebellion in North America."
Benjamin Franklin, joint postmaster general of the colonies (1753-1774), and his son William traveled to London together in 1757. There, for the next five years, William studied law, and Franklin studied social climbing. They had remarkable success for a candle-maker's son and his illegitimate progeny. By the end of their sojourn, William had become an attorney and received an honorary Master of Arts from Oxford University, while his father reveled in honorary doctorates from Oxford and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The elder Franklin's plans for his son's advancement succeeded, and his son won the choicest of appointments, a royal governorship, in 1762.
Franklin then accompanied his son from London to Pennsylvania, only to return to London as Pennsylvania's agent in 1764, where he lobbied for the placement of the colony under direct royal control. He soon added Georgia, New Jersey and Massachusetts to the list of colonies for which he served as spokesperson in Parliament.
In 1775, Franklin returned to America as the American Revolution approached; he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and, in 1776, signed the Declaration of Independence. Ironically, his son William came out on the side of the British during the War of Independence and was imprisoned while serving as the Loyalist governor of New Jersey.
1825 The first ship made in the U.S. with sheet iron was tested on the Susquehanna River. Named the Codorus, the vessel was built by Quaker John Elgar at York, Pa. using sheet iron fastened with iron rivets. The ship weighted five tons, of which two tons was for the coal- and wood- fueled boiler which provided power for an 8 h.p. engine. With a keel length of 60-ft and a 9-ft beam, the ship drew about seven inches of water. The next spring, the steamboat performed according to design by completing an upriver trip to Binghamton, N.Y. - the only steamboat to do so. The difficult three-month voyage proved that upstream navigation on the shallow, rock-filled Susquehanna was impractical.
1832 The first street car to be used in the U.S. took its initial trip with municipal officals in New York City. Named the John Mason, after a prominent New York Banker, the carriage was horse-drawn and rode on iron wheels along iron rails laid in the middle of the road. The track ran along Fourth Avenue from Prince Street to 14th Street. The carriage had three non-connecting compartments, each able to carry ten passengers. Public transportation began on 26 Nov 1832 for a fare of 12-1/2 cents. The conveyance was designed and built by John Stephenson in Philadelphia. Although horses had previously been used to haul trains on railroad tracks, this was the first horse-drawn street-car.
1862 American Civil War: President Abraham Lincoln approves General Ambrose Burnside's plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, leading to the Battle of Fredericksburg.
1851 Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville about the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, is published by Harper & Brothers in New York. Moby-Dick is now considered a great classic of American literature and contains one of the most famous opening lines in fiction: "Call me Ishmael." Initially, though, the book about Captain Ahab and his quest for a giant white whale was a flop.
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 and as a young man spent time in the merchant marines, the U.S. Navy and on a whaling ship in the South Seas. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, a romantic adventure based on his experiences in Polynesia. The book was a success and a sequel, Omoo, was published in 1847. Three more novels followed, with mixed critical and commercial results. Melville's sixth book, Moby-Dick, was first published in October 1851 in London, in three volumes titled The Whale, and then in the U.S. a month later. Melville had promised his publisher an adventure story similar to his popular earlier works, but instead, Moby-Dick was a tragic epic, influenced in part by Melville's friend and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels include The Scarlet Letter.
After Moby-Dick's disappointing reception, Melville continued to produce novels, short stories (Bartleby) and poetry, but writing wasn't paying the bills so in 1865 he returned to New York to work as a customs inspector, a job he held for 20 years.
Melville died in 1891, largely forgotten by the literary world. By the 1920s, scholars had rediscovered his work, particularly Moby-Dick, which would eventually become a staple of high school reading lists across the United States. Billy Budd, Melville's final novel, was published in 1924, 33 years after his death.
1882 Franklin Leslie kills Billy "The Kid" Claiborne On this day, the gunslinger Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie shoots the Billy "The Kid" Claiborne dead in the streets of Tombstone, Arizona.
The town of Tombstone is best known today as the site of the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral. In the 1880s, however, Tombstone was home to many gunmen who never achieved the enduring fame of Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday. Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie was one of the most notorious of these largely forgotten outlaws.
There are few surviving details about Leslie's early life. At different times, he claimed to have been born in both Texas and Kentucky, to have studied medicine in Europe, and to have been an army scout in the war against the Apache Indians. No evidence has ever emerged to support or conclusively deny these claims. The first historical evidence of Leslie's life emerges in 1877, when he became a scout in Arizona. A few years later, Leslie was attracted to the moneymaking opportunities of the booming mining town of Tombstone, where he opened the Cosmopolitan Hotel in 1880. That same year he killed a man named Mike Killeen during a quarrel over Killeen's wife, and he married the woman shortly thereafter.
Leslie's reputation as a cold-blooded killer brought him trouble after his drinking companion and fellow gunman John Ringo was found dead in July 1882. Some Tombstone citizens, including a young friend of Ringo's named Billy "The Kid" Claiborne, were convinced that Leslie had murdered Ringo, though they could not prove it. Probably seeking vengeance and the notoriety that would come from shooting a famous gunslinger, Claiborne unwisely decided to publicly challenge Leslie, who shot him dead.
The remainder of Leslie's life was equally violent and senseless. After divorcing Killeen in 1887, he took up with a Tombstone prostitute, whom he murdered several years later during a drunken rage. Even by the loose standards of frontier law in Tombstone, the murder of an unarmed woman was unacceptable, and Leslie served nearly 10 years in prison before he was paroled in 1896. After his release, he married again and worked a variety of odd jobs around the West. He reportedly made a small fortune in the gold fields of the Klondike region before he disappeared forever from the historical record.
1889 Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in seventy-two days.
1916 Ottoman Empire declares a holy war In Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, the religious leader Sheikh-ul-Islam declares an Islamic holy war on behalf of the Ottoman government, urging his Muslim followers to take up arms against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro in World War I.
By the time the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914, the Ottoman Empire was faltering, having lost much of its once considerable territory in Europe with its defeat in the First Balkan War two years earlier. Seeking to ally themselves with one of the great European powers to help safeguard them against future loss, the ambitious Ottoman leaders--members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), known collectively as the Young Turks--responded favorably to overtures made by Germany in August 1914. Though Germany and Turkey secretly concluded a military alliance on August 2, the Turks did not officially take part in World War I until several months later. On October 29, the Ottoman navy--including two German ships, Goeben and Breslau, which famously eluded the British navy in the first week of the war to reach Constantinople--attacked Russian ports in the Black Sea, marking the beginning of Turkey's participation in the war.
The sheikh's declaration of a holy war, made two weeks later, urged Muslims all over the world--including in the Allied countries--to rise up and defend the Ottoman Empire, as a protector of Islam, against its enemies. "Of those who go to the Jihad for the sake of happiness and salvation of the believers in God's victory," the declaration read, "the lot of those who remain alive is felicity, while the rank of those who depart to the next world is martyrdom. In accordance with God's beautiful promise, those who sacrifice their lives to give life to the truth will have honor in this world, and their latter end is paradise."
1940 World War II: In England, the city of Coventry is heavily bombed by German Luftwaffe bombers. Coventry Cathedral is almost completely destroyed.
1941 World War II: The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal sinks due to torpedo damage from U-81 sustained on November 13.
1957 The Apalachin Meeting outside Binghamton, New York is raided by law enforcement, and many high level Mafia figures are arrested.
1959 On this day in 1959, an article written by Massachusetts senator and presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy appears in an issue of TV Guide. In it, Kennedy examined the influence of television, still a relatively new technology, on American political campaigns.
In the article, Kennedy mused that television had the power to bring political campaigns—and scandals—immediately and directly to the public and illuminated the contrast between political personalities. Kennedy shrewdly noted that a "slick or bombastic orator pounding the table and ringing the rafters" fared poorly against a more congenial candidate and "is not as welcome in the family living room" as a candidate with "honesty, vigor, compassion [and] intelligence." Kennedy strove to convey the latter image. He also compared Woodrow Wilson's 1919 month-long cross-country railroad trek to promote his League of Nations proposal (an exhausting trip that ended when Wilson suffered a stroke) to then-President Eisenhower's ability to reach millions of voters in a 15-minute television appearance.
A year after the publication of the article, Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, faced off in the nation's first-ever televised presidential campaign debates. A master at projecting the quintessential presidential image, Kennedy exhibited a calm demeanor and responded to questions with intelligence and decorum. While Kennedy appeared rested, well-groomed and in control, Nixon appeared flustered and his light beard, or "five-o'clock shadow," created more of a stir than his responses to the moderator's questions. As president, Kennedy continued to showcase his skill at handling the press on-camera and carefully cultivated a relationship with journalists by enlisting their direct involvement in balancing candor with secrecy.
Kennedy's article also addressed the potential perils of marrying mass media to politics. He warned that political campaigns "could be taken over by public relations experts, who tell the candidate not only how to use TV but what to say, what to stand for and what kind of person to be." He cautioned Americans to be vigilant about what they watched, and to be aware that, like game shows, political campaigns "can be fixed...It is in your power to perceive deception, to shut off gimmickry, to reward honesty, to demand legislation where needed." Without the public's acquiescence, he said, "no TV show is worthwhile and no politician can exist."
1964 With the help of a fresh three inch cover of snow, the temperature at Ely, NV, dipped to 15 degrees below zero to establish an all-time record low for the month of November. That record of -15 degrees was later equalled on the 19th of November in 1985. (The Weather Channel)
1965 Vietnam War: The Battle of the Ia Drang begins - the first major engagement between regular American and North Vietnamese forces.
1967 A U.S. patent for "Ruby Laser Systems" was issued to Theodore Maiman (No. 3,353,115), for which he had applied on 13 Apr 1961. He had first operated a laser based on a ruby crystal on 16 May 1960, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
1967 Maj. Gen. Bruno Hochmuth, commander of the 3rd Marine Division, is killed when the helicopter in which he is travelling is shot down. He was the most senior U.S. officer to be killed in action in the war to date.
1969 Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the Moon.
1970 Southern Airways Flight 932 crashes in the mountains near Huntington, West Virginia, killing 75, including members of the Marshall University football team.
1973 In the United Kingdom, Princess Anne marries Captain Mark Phillips, in Westminster Abbey.
1974 A storm produced 15 inches of snow at the Buffalo, NY, airport, and 30 inches on the south shore of Lake Erie. (David Ludlum)
1979 Iran hostage crisis: US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive Order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.
1982 Lech Walêsa, the leader of Poland's outlawed Solidarity movement, is released after eleven months of internment near the Soviet border.
1985 The first discovery of a fullerene was published in the journal Nature. In Sep 1985, the American chemists Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Richard E. Smalley, colleagues at Rice met with Sir Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex, England. In 11 days of research, they discovered the first fullerene, C60, a spherical cluster of carbon atoms. The discovery, dubbed buckminsterfullerene or buckyballs, opened a new branch of chemistry, and all three men were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work.
1986 An early season cold wave set more than 200 records from the northwestern U.S. to the east coast over a seven day period. For some places it proved to be the coldest weather of the winter season. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders - 1987)
1986 Wall Street arbitrageur Ivan Boesky pleads guilty to insider trading and agrees to pay a $100 million fine and cooperate with the Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation. "Boesky Day," as the SEC would later call it, was crucial in exposing a nationwide scandal at the heart of the `80s Wall Street boom. Boesky testified that he had gained his $200 million fortune using illegal inside information about impending mergers to trade stock in the companies involved. As a result of Boesky's confession, subpoenas were issued to some of the world's most famous financiers, including "Junk Bond King" Michael Milken. Boesky's testimony brought Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment banking company, to justice for their participation in the illegal schemes. Milken paid over a billion dollars in fines and restitution and was sentenced to 10 years in prison; two years later his sentence was reduced to time served. In addition to his own financial penalty, Boesky received a three-year sentence, 22 months of which he served at Lompoc Federal Prison in California. Following this insider trading scandal, Congress increased the penalties for securities violations. After prison, Boesky divorced his wife and relocated to La Jolla, California. In contrast to Milken and others involved, Boesky has largely avoided public attention since the scandal, though he has surfaced to testify in still-unresolved legal proceedings. Despite his cooperation with the authorities, Ivan Boesky was demonized as a national symbol of greed and an example of the dangers of `80s-era excess.
1987 The first major snowstorm of the season hit the Southern and Central Rockies, producing 12 inches at the Brian Head ski resort in Utah overnight. Strong and gusty winds associated with the storm reached 52 mph at Ruidoso NM. In the eastern U.S., the temperature at Washington D.C. soared to 68 degrees, just three days after being buried under more than a foot of snow. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1988 A massive storm produced snow and gusty winds in the western U.S., with heavy snow in some of the higher elevations. Winds gusted to 66 mph at Show Low AZ, and Donner Summit, located in the Sierra Nevada Range of California, was buried under 23 inches of snow. Heavy rain soaked parts of California, with 3.19 inches reported at Blue Canyon. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1989 Unseasonably warm weather prevailed east of the Rockies. Temperatures reached 70 degrees as far north as New England, and readings in the 80s were reported across the southeast quarter of the nation. Nineteen cities reported record high temperatures for the date. For the second time in the month Dallas/Fort Worth TX equalled their record for November with an afternoon high of 89 degrees. The high of 91 degrees at Waco TX was their warmest of record for so late in the season. Heavy snow blanketed parts of Wyoming overnight, with a foot of snow reported at Cody, and ten inches at Yellowstone Park. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1991 American and British authorities announce indictments against two Libyan intelligence officials in connection with the downing of the Pan Am Flight 103.
1991 In Royal Oak, Michigan, a fired United States Postal Service employee goes on a shooting rampage, killing four and wounding five before committing suicide.
1995 A budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums and to run most government offices with skeleton staffs.
2002 The United States House of Representatives votes not to create an independent commission to investigate the September 11 attacks.
2003 Astronomers Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz discover 90377 Sedna, a Trans-Neptunian object.
2007 The last direct-current electrical distribution system in the United States is shut down in New York City by Con Edison.
Births
1777 Nathaniel Herbert Claiborne (d 1859) nineteenth century politician from Virginia. He was the brother of William Charles Cole Claiborne, the nephew of Thomas Claiborne, the uncle of John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne and the great-great-great granduncle Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs and Claiborne de Borda Pell.
1803 Jacob Abbott (d 1879) American writer of children's books.
1828 James Birdseye McPherson (d 1864) career United States Army officer who served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was killed at the Battle of Atlanta and was the highest ranking Union officer killed during the war.
1861 Frederick Jackson Turner (d 1932) American historian in the early 20th century. He is best known for his book, The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
1863 Leo Hendrik Baekeland (d 1944) Belgian-born U.S. industrial chemist who invented the first thermosetting plastic, Bakelite, that did not soften when heated. His first successful invention was Velox (in the 1890's), a photographic paper that could be used with artificial light rather than sunlight, which he sold in1899 to George Eastman for $1 million. He then experimented to find a synthetic substitute for shellac, a useful insulator of wires in electric coils. Eventually, he was able to control heat and pressure for a formaldehyde-phenol reaction. By 1909, he displayed the world's first fully synthetic plastic, which could be used not only for insulators, but moulded into buttons, knobs and countless other items. With this patented product, he helped found the modern plastics industry.
1865 Walter Jackson Freeman II, M.D. (d 1972) American physician who specialized in lobotomy. He was a member of the American Psychiatric Association.
1896 Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower (d 1979) wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and First Lady of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
1900 Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer of concert and film music. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as "the dean of American composers." Copland's music achieved a balance between modern music and American folk styles. The open, slowly changing harmonies of many of his works are said to evoke the vast American landscape. Copland incorporated percussive orchestration, metric changes, polyrhythms, polychords, and tone rows in a broad range of works for the concert hall, theater, ballet and films. In addition to being a composer, Copland was a teacher, lecturer, critic, writer and conductor – generally, but not always, of his own works (Billy the Kid, Appalachian Spring).
1907 Howard William Hunter (d 1995) fourteenth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in 1994 and 1995. His nine month presidential tenure is the shortest in the history of the Church. Hunter was the first president of the LDS Church born in the 20th century.
1908 Harrison Evans Salisbury (d 1993), American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (1955), was the first regular New York Times correspondent in Moscow after World War II
1908 Joseph Raymond McCarthy (d 1957) American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion. He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, McCarthy's tactics and his inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.
1912 Barbara Woolworth Hutton (d 1979) American socialite dubbed by the media as the "Poor Little Rich Girl" because of her troubled life. She donated Winfield House to the United States government, to be used as the residence of the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, in a symbolic $1 transaction following World War II.
1916 Sherwood Charles Schwartz American television producer. He worked on radio shows in the 1940s, and created the television series Gilligan's Island on CBS and The Brady Bunch on ABC. On March 7, 2008, Schwartz, still active in his 90s, was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
1921 Brian Keith (d 1997) American film, television, and stage actor, who in his four decade-long career gained recognition for his work in movies such as the 1961 Disney film, The Parent Trap, the 1966 movie, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, and the 1975 movie, The Wind and the Lion. On television, two of his best known roles were that of a widowed uncle turned bachelor, Bill Davis, in the 1960s sitcom, Family Affair, and the title character of a tough judge in the 1980s drama Hardcastle and McCormick.
1929 James Anthony Piersall former center fielder in Major League Baseball. Between 1950 and 1967, he played for the Boston Red Sox (1950, 1952-58), Cleveland Indians (1959-61), Washington Senators (1962-63), New York Mets (1963), and Los Angeles/California Angels (1963-67). While he had a fairly good professional career as a center fielder, Piersall is better known for his well-publicized battle with bipolar disorder that became the subject of the book and movie Fear Strikes Out.
1933 Fred Wallace Haise, Jr, engineer and former NASA astronaut. He is one of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon. Haise was born in Biloxi, Mississippi. He attended Biloxi High School and Perkinston Junior College (now Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College). He graduated with honors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1959. He completed post-graduate courses at the USAF Aerospace Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1964 and the Harvard Business School PMD Program in 1972.
1938 Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos ) American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Several years prior, two Carlos compositions using classical (pre-Moog) electronic techniques had been issued on LP (Variations for Flute and Tape and Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers). Although the first Carlos Moog albums were interpretations of the works of classical composers, she later resumed releasing original compositions.
1947 Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He is known in the United Kingdom as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s. He is the author of 16 books, of which his latest, Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards, was released in September 2010. This was preceded in 2009 by Driving Like Crazy. According to a 60 Minutes profile, he is also the most quoted living man in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations. He is considered a libertarian, and is often quoted by libertarian and antisocialist writers and pundits.
1948 Charles, Prince of Wales
1954 Condoleezza Rice American professor, politician, diplomat and author. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, and was the second person to hold that office in the administration of President George W. Bush. Rice was the first African-American woman secretary of state, as well as the second African American (after Colin Powell), and the second woman (after Madeleine Albright). Rice was President Bush's National Security Advisor during his first term. Before joining the Bush administration, she was a professor of political science at Stanford University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999. Rice served as the Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification.
1964 Bill Hemmer (born William George Hemmer, American television news anchor. He is a co-host of America's Newsroom on the Fox News Channel.[
1966 Curtis Montague Schilling, Anchorage, Alaska, former American Major League Baseball right-handed pitcher. He helped lead the Philadelphia Phillies to the World Series in 1993 and has won World Series championships in 2001 with the Arizona Diamondbacks and in 2004 and 2007 with the Boston Red Sox. Schilling retired with a career postseason record of 11–2, which is equivalent to a .846 postseason winning percentage, a major-league record among pitchers with at least 10 decisions
Deaths
1832 Charles Carroll of Carrollton (September 19, 1737 – November 14, 1832) was a wealthy Maryland planter and an early advocate of independence from Great Britain. He served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and later as United States Senator for Maryland. He was the only Catholic and the longest-lived (and last surviving) signatory of the Declaration of Independence, dying at the age of 95.
1914 Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915. He was representative of the last generation of black leaders born in slavery and spoke on behalf of blacks living in the South. Washington was able throughout the final 25 years of his life to maintain his standing as the major black leader because of the sponsorship by powerful whites, substantial support within the black community, his ability to raise educational funds from both groups, and his accommodation to the social realities of the age of Jim Crow segregation.
1916 Henry George, Jr. (b 1862) United States Representative from New York and son of American political economist Henry George (1839–1897).
1972 Martin Dies, Jr. (b 1900) Texas politician and a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives. His father, Martin Dies, was also a member of the United States House of Representatives.
1974 Johnny Mack Brown (b 1904) All-American college football player and film actor.
1990 Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (b 1903) was an English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. During World War II, he was a soldier and a spy. He is credited with popularising Mother Teresa and in his later years became a Catholic.
Havasupai Cliff Dwelling
1997 George Edward Arcaro (b 1916), known professionally as Eddie Arcaro, was an American Thoroughbred horse racing Hall of Fame jockey who won more American Classic Races than any other jockey in history and is the only rider to have won the U.S. Triple Crown twice. He is widely regarded as the greatest jockey in the history of American Thoroughbred horse racing.
2000 Robert (Bob) Trout (b 1909) American broadcast news reporter, best known for his radio work before and during World War II. He became known to some as the "Iron Man of Radio" for his ability to ad lib while on the air, as well as his stamina, composure, and elocution.
2006 Sumner Shapiro (b 1926) United States Navy Rear Admiral who served as Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence from 1978 to 1982.
Christian Feast Day
Barlaam of Kiev
Philip the Apostle (Eastern Orthodox Church)
Serapion of Algiers
(Nov 15) Some of the events are so labled because I inadvertently worked off a display of the wrong day and these events actually happened on November 15. Sorry.
daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
www.todayinsci.com/11/11_14.htm
www.weatherforyou.com/cgi-bin/weather_history/today2S.pl
www.amug.org/~jpaul/nov15.html
www.scopesys.com/cgi-bin/today2.cgi
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/moby-dick-published