Post by farmgal on Nov 16, 2012 20:52:47 GMT -5
November 18 is the 32rd day of this leap year, in the Gregorian calendar.
There are 43 days remaining until the end of the year.
Countdown until Obama should be leaving Office
www.obamaclock.org/
Days until coming elections:
www.daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
1095 Pope Urban II opened the Council of Clermont. Summoned to plan the First Crusade, it was attended by over 200 bishops. Among its official policies, the Council decreed that a pilgrimage to Jerusalem made every other penance superfluous.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Clermont
1302 Pope Boniface VIII published the bull "Unam Sanctam." It was the first papal writing to decree that spiritual power took precedent over temporal power, and that subjection to the pope was necessary to salvation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unam_sanctam
www.catholicplanet.com/TSM/Unam-Sanctam-English.htm
1493 Christopher Columbus first sights the island now known as Puerto Rico.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico#Spanish_colony
1626 In Rome, the newly completed St Peter's Basilica was consecrated by Urban VIII. St. Peter's is presently the largest church in Christendom, with a length of 619 feet.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Basilica
1755 Worst quake in Massachusetts Bay area strikes Boston; no deaths reported. At about 4:30 in the morning on November 18, 1755, a strong earthquake rocked the New England area. Observers reported damage to chimneys, brick buildings, and stone walls in coastal communities from Portland, Maine to south of Boston, Massachusetts. Chimneys were also damaged as far away as Springfield, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut. The earthquake was felt at Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the northeast, Lake Champlain to the northwest, and Winyah, South Carolina to the southwest. The crew of ship in deep water about 70 leagues east of Boston thought it had run aground and only realized it had felt an earthquake when it arrived at Boston later that same day.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Cape_Ann_Earthquake
1784 American-born Anglican priest Samuel Seabury (1729–1796) was ordained a bishop in Scotland. He was the second Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, USA, and the first Bishop of Connecticut. He had been a leading Loyalist in New York City during the American Revolution. During the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church was sometimes called the Tory Party at prayers.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Seabury_(bishop)
1845 Charles Thurber was issued his second patent for a machine that was a typewriter precursor. This one he named the Chirographer (No. 4272). He is creditted with the first U.S. patent on a typewriter with platen movement and automatic letter spacing, which he patented two years earlier, called "Thurber's Patent Printer" (No. 3,228, 26 Aug 1843).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Thurber_(inventor)
1865 Mark Twain publishes "Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first published in the November 18, 1865, edition of The New York Saturday Press, under the title "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." The story, which has also been published as "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," is set in a gold-mining camp in Calaveras County, California, and has its origins in the folklore of the Gold Rush era. It was one of Twain's earliest writings, and helped establish his reputation as a humorist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of_Calaveras_County
1866 English devotional writer Katherine Hankey, 32, penned the verses that we sing today as the hymn, "I Love to Tell the Story."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Hankey
www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/h/a/n/hankey_ak.htm
1873 A severe storm raged from Georgia to Nova Scotia causing great losses to fishing fleets along the coast. In Maine, the barometric pressure reached 28.49 inches at Portland. (David Ludlum)
1874 National Woman's Christian Temperance Union organizes in Cleveland The Second Presbyterian Church on Wednesday, November 18, 1874, 300 women assembled to establish the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Sixteen states were represented, with 135 women registered as delegates. At this convention, the organization was put in place with elected permanent officers and a constitution.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman%27s_Christian_Temperance_Union
1883 Standard time in the U.S. went into effect at noon for the first time due a decision of the American Railway Association. The actual local time, or "sun time" constantly changes as one moves either east or west. With the arrival of railroad travel, the situation raised problems for railway lines and passengers trying to synchronize schedules in different cities. The need for a system of standardized time was evident. The system adopted was first proposed by Charles F. Dowd (1825 - 1904), a school principal in New York state. North America was divided into four time zones, fifteen degrees of longitude, and one hour of "standard time" apart. Sir Stanford Fleming proposed the extension of the Dowd system to the whole world with 24 time zones.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_time
1893 Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) published the encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which strongly encouraged Roman Catholic educators to teach sound courses in biblical introduction and interpretation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providentissimus_Deus
1894 First newspaper Sunday color comic section published (NY World)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics
1894 Concordia Teachers College (Seward, Nebraska) was dedicated.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_University_(Nebraska)
1903 The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty is signed by the United States and Panama, giving the United States exclusive rights over the Panama Canal Zone.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay-Bunau-Varilla_Treaty
1909 Two United States warships are sent to Nicaragua after 500 revolutionaries (including two Americans) are executed by order of José Santos Zelaya.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Santos_Zelaya
1911 The opera "Lobetanz" 1st American performance
1913 The first airplane in the U.S. to perform a loop-the-loop was piloted by Lincoln Beachey over North Isalnd, San Diego, California. At a level of 1,000 feet, he brought his aircraft up with a swoop and a moment later was flying head downward. He completed the loop at a height of 300 feet. Ten days later he performed a triple loop. Beachey was one of the more colorful characters of early aviation. By 1912, he was a stunt pilot of great repute. His daring acts made him well known in aviation circles. In Chicago, he flew along a string of boxcars first rolling one wheel then the other alternatively along the car roofs as the train was rolling down the tracks. He died in 1915, at age 28, from a crash while performing stunts at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, Cal.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Beachey
1916 World War I: First Battle of the Somme in France, British Expeditionary Force commander Douglas Haig calls off the battle which started on July 1, 1916.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_the_Somme
1925 The Minneapolis Theses were adopted by the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America and by the Ohio, Iowa and Buffalo Synods. The theses formed the doctrinal basis of the American Lutheran Church, organized in 1930, and of The American Lutheran Conference.
cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=m&word=MINNEAPOLISTHESES1
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1926 Pope Pius XI encyclical Iniquis Afflictisque (On the Persecution of the Church in Mexico).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iniquis_Afflictisque
www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_18111926_iniquis-afflictisque_en.html
1926 Pope Pius XI encyclical On the persecution of the Church in Mexico
www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_28021926_rerum-ecclesiae_en.html
1928 Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse debuts in NY in "Steamboat Willie"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse
1929 Large quake in Atlantic [/img]breaks Transatlantic cable
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Grand_Banks_earthquake
1931 Ludwig E. Fuerbringer (1864–1947) became president of Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis).
cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=F&word=FUERBRINGER.LUDWIGERNEST
1932 "Flowers & Trees" receives 1st Academy Award for a cartoon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_%26_Trees
1936 Main span of Golden Gate Bridge joined
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_Bridge#Construction
1938 Trade union members elect John L. Lewis as the first president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Lewis
1940 World War II: German leader Adolf Hitler and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano meet to discuss Benito Mussolini's disastrous invasion of Greece.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galeazzo_Ciano#Foreign_Minister
1940 New York City's "Mad Bomber" George Metesky places his first bomb at a Manhattan office building used by Consolidated Edison.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Metesky
1943 World War II -- Battle of Berlin: 440 Royal Air Force planes bomb Berlin causing only light damage and killing 131. The RAF loses nine aircraft and 53 air crew.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin
1943 1st US ambassador to Canada, Ray Atherton, nominated
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Atherton
1949 Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn Dodgers, named NL's MVP
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Robinson
1950 The first fluoro-record reflector camera was announced. This could make x-ray pictures in one-sixth of the time previously required, and was used for gastro-instestinal surveys. The manufacturer was the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., Jamaica, N.Y.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Camera_and_Instrument
1951 "See it Now" premieres on TV. It was an American newsmagazine and documentary series broadcast by CBS from 1951 to 1958. It was created by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, Murrow being the host of the show. From 1952 to 1957, See It Now won four Emmy Awards and was nominated three other times. It also won a 1952 Peabody Award, which cited its
simple, lucid, intelligent analysis of top news stories of the week on television … a strikingly effective format for presenting news and the personalities involved in the news with humor, sometimes with indignation, always with careful thought.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_It_Now
1955 An early season cold snap finally came to an end. Helena, MT, experienced 138 consecutive hours of subzero temperatures, including a reading of 29 below zero, which surpassed by seven degrees their previous record for the month of November. Missoula MT broke their November record by 12 degrees with a reading of 23 below zero, and Salt Lake City UT smashed their previous November record of zero with a reading of 14 below. Heavy snow in the Great Basin closed Donner Pass CA, and total crop damage from the cold wave amounted to eleven million dollars. (David Ludlum)
1957 A tornado, 100 yards in width, travelled a nearly "straight as an arrow" 27-mile path from near Rosa AL to near Albertville AL, killing three persons. A home in the Susan Moore community in Blount County was picked up and dropped 500 feet away killing one person. (The Weather Channel)
1960 Copyright Office issues its 10 millionth registration
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Office
1961 US Ranger 2 launched to Moon; failed
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_2
1961 United States President John F. Kennedy sends 18,000 military advisors to South Vietnam.
www.blupete.com/Memoirs/Memoirs016.htm
1963 The first telephone in the U.S. with push buttons instead of a rotary dial was placed in commercial service in Carnegie and Greensburg, Pa. This was a Touch-Tone telephone with 10 push buttons, manufactured by the Western Electric Manufacturing and supply Unit of the Bell System. The optional service was offered for an extra charge. Some previous marketing trials had taken place in Ohio and Pennsylvania. A 10 button dial was inserted into an adapter taking the place of the rotary dial. The use of 12 Button dials with * and # keys for special services came out rather quickly after the introduction of Touch Tone Service in 1963, and the 10 button dial was discontinued.
1965 A decree on the Apostolate of the Laity was issued by the Second Vatican Council.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolicam_Actuositatem
1966 This was the last required meatless Friday for American Roman Catholics. In February Pope Paul VI (1897–1978) had made an apostolic decree that prayer or charitable works might be substituted as penance instead of fasting and abstinence. US RC bishops did away with rule against eating meat on Fridays
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_and_abstinence_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Church
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Paul_VI
1970 Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling declared this day that large doses of Vitamin C could ward off the common cold. He proposed that regular intake of vitamin C in amounts far higher than the officially sanctioned RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) could help prevent and shorten the duration of the common cold. He concluded that the optimal daily intake of vitamin C for most people is 2.3 grams to 10 grams daily. Although the medical establishment immediately voiced their strong opposition to this idea, many ordinary people believed Dr. Pauling and began taking large amounts of vitamin C. He wrote a book on the subject Vitamin C and the Common Cold (1970) which became a best-seller.
1970 - U.S. President Richard Nixon asks the U.S. Congress for $155 million USD in supplemental aid for the Cambodian government.
1978 In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple cult to a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo J. Ryan is murdered by members of the Peoples Temple hours earlier.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown,_Guyana
1985 Enterprise (OV-101) turned over to the Smithsonian Institution In 1985, Enterprise was partially disassembled to allow certain components to be reused in other shuttles, then underwent an international tour visiting France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the U.S. states of California, Alabama, and Louisiana. It was also used to fit-check the never-used shuttle launch pad, SLC-6 at Vandenberg AFB, California. Finally, on November 18, 1985, Enterprise was ferried to Washington, D.C., where it became property of the Smithsonian Institution
1986 The first of two successive snowstorms struck the northeastern U.S. The storm produced up to 20 inches of snow in southern New Hampshire. Two days later a second storm produced up to 30 inches of snow in northern Maine. (Storm Data)
1987 It was a windy day across parts of the nation. Gale force winds whipped the Great Lakes Region. Winds gusting to 80 mph in western New York State damaged buildings and flipped over flatbed trailers at Churchville. In Montana, high winds in the Upper Yellowstone Valley gusted to 64 mph at Livingston. Strong Santa Ana winds buffeted the mountains and valleys of southern California. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1987 Iran-Contra Affair: the U.S. Congress issues its final report on the Iran-Contra Affair.
1988 Thunderstorms developing along a warm front drenched Little Rock AR with 7.01 inches of rain, smashing their previous record for the date of 1.91 inches. (The National Weather Summary)
1988 War on Drugs: U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill into law allowing the death penalty for drug traffickers.
1989 - A second surge of arctic air brought record cold to parts of the north central U.S. Eleven cities in the Upper Midwest reported record low temperatures for the date, including Rochester MN with a reading of 4 degrees below zero. Strong winds ushering the arctic air into the north central U.S. produced squalls in the Lower Great Lakes Region. Snowfall totals in northern Ohio ranged up to twenty inches in Ashatabula County and Geauga County. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1991 Muslim Shites release hostages Terry Waite & Thomas Sutherland Births In January 1987 while negotiating for the release of Western hostages in Lebanon, Waite was taken captive and remained in captivity for 1,763 days, the first four years of which were spent in total solitary confinement. Sutherland had been held hostage for 2,354 days.
1993 In the United States, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is ratified by the House of Representatives.
1997 Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays expansion draft The expansion draft for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks is held in Phoenix, Arizona. Florida pitcher Tony Saunders is taken with the 1st pick by the Devil Rays, while the Diamondbacks select pitcher Brian Anderson from Cleveland. Following the draft, the Diamondbacks acquire 3B Travis Fryman from the Tigers in exchange for infielders Joe Randa and Gabe Alvarez and P Matt Drews. They also obtain OF Devon White from the Marlins in exchange for P Jesus Martinez. In a rash of moves, the Devil Rays get 1B Fred McGriff from the Braves in exchange for a player to be named, C John Flaherty from the Padres in exchange for P Brian Boehringer and IF Andy Sheets, SS Kevin Stocker from the Phillies in exchange for Bobby Abreu, and sign free agent P Roberto Hernandez to a 4-year contract.
2003 In a 50-page, 4–3 decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules that the state may not "deny the protections, benefits and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry."
Births
1800 John Nelson Darby, founder and leader of a branch of the Plymouth Brethren, (d 29 Apr 1882).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darby_(evangelist)
1849 Russell Kelso Carter born in Baltimore, and died at Catonsville, Maryland-- and between these two events he was a successful chemistry professor, a sheep rancher, a minister, author, hymn writer, composer, and publisher. To top it off, he became a successful doctor. Our main interest in Carter are the words and music of "Standing on the Promises " among some 68 hymn tunes and 52 poems, most of them found in Hymns of the Christian Life, which he assisted Dr. A. B. Simpson compile for the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/c/a/r/carter_rk.htm
1861 Dorothy Dix (d 1951), was the pseudonym of U.S. journalist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer. As the forerunner of today's popular advice columnists, Dorothy Dix was America's highest paid and most widely read female journalist at the time of her death. Her advice on marriage was syndicated in newspapers around the world. With an estimated audience of 60 million readers, she became a popular and recognized figure on her travels abroad.
1810 Asa Gray (d 1888) America's leading botanist in the mid-19th century, extensively studying North American flora, he did more work than any other botanist to unify the taxonomic knowledge of plants of this region. He was Darwin's strongest early supporter in the U.S.; in 1857, he was the third scientist to be told of his theory (after Hooker and Lyell). He debated L. Agassiz between 1859 and 1861 on variation and geographic distribution Gray's discovery of close affinities between East Asian and North American floras was a key piece of evidence in favor of evolution. Though not fully comfortable with selection, he argued that evolution was compatible with religious belief and slid towards theistic evolutionism. Gray co-authored Flora of North America.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Gray
1874 Clarence Shepard Day, Jr. (d 1935) American author. Day's most famous work is the autobiographical Life with Father (1935), which detailed humorous episodes in his family's life, centering on his domineering father, during the 1890s in New York City. Scenes from the book, along with its 1932 predecessor, God and My Father, and its 1937 sequel, Life with Mother, published posthumously, were the basis for the 1939 play by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, which became one of Broadway's longest-running, non-musical hits. In 1947—the year the play ended on Broadway—William Powell and Irene Dunne portrayed Day's parents in the film of the same name. Life with Father co-starred a young Elizabeth Taylor and an even younger Martin Milner (later one of the two police-officer stars of the 1968 TV series Adam-12), and received Oscar nominations for cinematography, art direction, musical score and best actor (Powell). Life with Father also became a popular 1953–1955 television sitcom.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Day
1883 Carl Vinson (d 1981) United States Representative from Georgia. He was a Democrat and the first person to serve for more than 50 years in the United States House of Representatives. He was known as "The Father of the Two-Ocean Navy".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Vinson
1899 Eugene Ormandy (d 1985) (Jeno Blau) Hungarian-born conductor and violinist.
1899 Howard Thurman (d 10 Apr 1981) influential American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader. He was Dean of Chapel at Howard University and Boston University for more than two decades, wrote 21 books, and in 1944 helped found a multicultural church.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Thurman
1900 George Bogdan Kistiakowsky (d 1982) Russian American chemist who worked on developing the first atomic bomb but later advocated banning nuclear weapons. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1926, and taught chemistry at Princeton University then Harvard (1930-71). He served as special assistant to President Eisenhower for science and technology (1959-61). As head of the explosives division of the Los Alamos Laboratory during WW II (1944-46), he oversaw 600 people developing explosives for the first atom bomb. The conventional explosives are used for its detonation to uniformly compress the plutonium sphere and achieve critical mass. In 1977, he became chairman of the Council for a Livable World, which opposes nuclear war.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bogdan_Kistiakowsky
1901 George Horace Gallup (d 1984) American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion.
1906 George Wald (d 1997) American biochemist who received (with Haldan K. Hartline of the U.S. and Ragnar Granit of Sweden) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1967 for his work on the chemistry of vision. While researching the biochemistry of vision at Harvard University, he disclosed the presence of Vitamin A in the retina of the eye. In later work, he identified visual pigments and their precursors. As a byproduct he described the absorption spectra of the different types of cones serving colour vision. His important discovery of the primary molecular reaction to light in the eye represented a dramatic advance in vision since it plays the role of a trigger in the photoreceptors of all living animals.
1908 Imogene Fernandez de Coca (d 2001) American comic actress best known for her role opposite Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. Starting out in vaudeville as a child acrobat, she studied ballet and wished to have a serious career in music and dance, graduating to decades of stage musical revues, cabaret and summer stock. Finally in her 40s she began a celebrated career as a comedienne in television, starring in six series and guesting on successful television programs from the 1940s to the 1990s. She was nominated for five Emmy awards for Your Show of Shows, winning Best Actress in 1951 and singled out for a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting in 1953. Coca was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1978 for On the Twentieth Century and received a sixth Emmy nomination at the age of 80 for an episode of Moonlighting.
1909 Johnny Mercer, American lyricist (d. 1976)
1923 Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr. (d 1998) America's first man in space and one of only 12 humans who walked on the Moon. Named as one of the nation's original seven Mercury astronauts in 1959, Shepard became the first American into space on 5 May 1961, riding a Redstone rocket on a 15-minute suborbital flight that took him and his Freedom 7 Mercury capsule 115 miles in altitude and 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, FL. (His flight came three weeks after the launch of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who on 12 Apr 1961, became the first human space traveler on a one-orbit flight lasting 108 minutes.) Although the flight of Freedom 7 was brief, it was a major step for U.S. in a race with the USSR.
1923 Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens (d 2010) United States Senator from Alaska, serving from December 24, 1968, until January 3, 2009, and thus the longest-serving Republican senator in history. He was President pro tempore in the 108th and 109th Congresses from January 3, 2003, to January 3, 2007, and the third senator to hold the title of President pro tempore emeritus.
1925 Gene William Mauch (November 18, 1925 – August 8, 2005) was an American infielder and manager in Major League Baseball best known for managing four teams from 1960 to 1987. He is by far the winningest manager to have never won a league pennant (breaking the record formerly held by Jimmy Dykes), three times coming within a single victory. He managed the Philadelphia Phillies (1960-68), Montreal Expos (1969–75, Mauch was their inaugural manager), Minnesota Twins (1976–80), and California Angels (1981–82, 1985–87). His 1,902 career victories ranked 8th in major league history when he retired, and his 3,942 total games ranked 4th. He gained a reputation for playing a distinctive "small ball" style, which emphasized defense, speed and base-to-base tactics on offense rather than power hitting.
1927 Hank Ballard (d 2003), born John Henry Kendricks, rhythm and blues singer, the lead vocalist of Hank Ballard and The Midnighters and one of the first proto-rock 'n' roll artists to emerge in the early 1950s. He played an integral part in the development of rock music, releasing the hit singles "Work With Me, Annie" and answer songs "Annie Had a Baby" and "Annie's Aunt Fannie" with his Midnighters. He later wrote and recorded "The Twist" and invented the dance, which was notably covered by Chubby Checker.
1929 Gianna D'Angelo American coloratura soprano, primarily active in the 1950s and 1960s.
1945 Wilma Pearl Mankiller (d 2010) first female Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She served as the Principal Chief for ten years from 1985 to 1995.
Deaths
1899 August Reinke, pioneer of deaf ministry, (b 29 Sep 1841).
cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=R&word=REINKE.AUGUST
1886 Chester A. Arthur, 21st President of the United States (b. 1829) Arthur was a member of the Republican Party and worked as a lawyer before becoming the 20th Vice President under James Garfield. While Garfield was mortally wounded by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881, he did not die until September 19 of that year, at which time Arthur was sworn in as president, serving until March 4, 1885.
1898 John Ernst Worrell Keely (b 1827) fraudulent American inventor. In 1873 he announced that he had discovered a new physical force that, if harnessed, would produce unheard-of power. He claimed, for example, to be able to produce from a quart of water enough fuel to move a 30-car train from Philadelphia to New York City. He began construction of an engine to perform this feat and by 1874 was able to give preliminary demonstrations of his machine. He made a great show of guarding the secret of the motor he was developing to obtain power "from intermolecular vibrations of ether," and scientists and engineers scoffed at his unverified claims.
1949 Frank Baldwin Jewett (b 1879) U.S. electrical engineer who directed research as the first president of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., (1925-40). Jewett believed that the best science and technology result from bringing together and nurturing the best minds. Under his tenure Bell Labs laid the foundation for a new scientific discipline, radio astronomy, and transformed movies by synchronizing sound to pictures. Bell Labs was the first to transmit television over a long distance in the U.S. and designed the first electrical digital computer. Bell Labs won its first Nobel Prize in physics for fundamental work demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
1978 James Warren "Jim" Jones (b 1931) founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 suicide of more than 900 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip.
1978 Leo Joseph Ryan, Jr. (b 1925) American politician of the Democratic Party. He served as a U.S. Representative from the 11th Congressional District of California from 1973 until he was murdered in Guyana by members of the Peoples Temple shortly before the Jonestown Massacre in 1978.
1994 Cabell "Cab" Calloway III (b 1907) American jazz singer and bandleader. He was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s. Calloway's band featured performers including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry, New Orleans guitar ace Danny Barker, and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform until his death in 1994 at the age of 86.
Christian Feast Day:
Abhai of Hach (Syriac Orthodox Church)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhai_of_Hach
Dedication of the Basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Basilica
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Saint_Paul_Outside_the_Walls
Juthwara (Roman Catholic Church)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juthwara
Mabyn (Roman Catholic Church and Anglican communion)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabyn
Rose Philippine Duchesne (Roman Catholic Church)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Philippine_Duchesne
November 18 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Saints
Martyr Platon of Ancyra (266)
atlantaserbs.com/learnmore/ThisMonthInOrthodoxy-December.htm
Romanus of Caesarea, deacon (303)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanus_of_Caesarea
Barulas, child martyr (303)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barulas
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daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
www.todayinsci.com/11/11_18.htm
www.weatherforyou.com/cgi-bin/weather_history/today2S.pl
www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/c/a/r/carter_rk.htm
www.christianhistorytimeline.com/lives_events/birthday/index.php
www.amug.org/~jpaul/nov18.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_18
www.scopesys.com/cgi-bin/today2.cgi
www.hymntime.com/tch/index.htm
www.lutheranhistory.org/history/tih1118.htm
www.lcms.org/
www.cyberhymnal.org/index.htm#lk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_18_(Eastern_Orthodox_liturgics)
There are 43 days remaining until the end of the year.
Countdown until Obama should be leaving Office
www.obamaclock.org/
Days until coming elections:
www.daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
1095 Pope Urban II opened the Council of Clermont. Summoned to plan the First Crusade, it was attended by over 200 bishops. Among its official policies, the Council decreed that a pilgrimage to Jerusalem made every other penance superfluous.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Clermont
1302 Pope Boniface VIII published the bull "Unam Sanctam." It was the first papal writing to decree that spiritual power took precedent over temporal power, and that subjection to the pope was necessary to salvation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unam_sanctam
www.catholicplanet.com/TSM/Unam-Sanctam-English.htm
1493 Christopher Columbus first sights the island now known as Puerto Rico.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico#Spanish_colony
1626 In Rome, the newly completed St Peter's Basilica was consecrated by Urban VIII. St. Peter's is presently the largest church in Christendom, with a length of 619 feet.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Basilica
1755 Worst quake in Massachusetts Bay area strikes Boston; no deaths reported. At about 4:30 in the morning on November 18, 1755, a strong earthquake rocked the New England area. Observers reported damage to chimneys, brick buildings, and stone walls in coastal communities from Portland, Maine to south of Boston, Massachusetts. Chimneys were also damaged as far away as Springfield, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut. The earthquake was felt at Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the northeast, Lake Champlain to the northwest, and Winyah, South Carolina to the southwest. The crew of ship in deep water about 70 leagues east of Boston thought it had run aground and only realized it had felt an earthquake when it arrived at Boston later that same day.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Cape_Ann_Earthquake
1784 American-born Anglican priest Samuel Seabury (1729–1796) was ordained a bishop in Scotland. He was the second Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, USA, and the first Bishop of Connecticut. He had been a leading Loyalist in New York City during the American Revolution. During the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church was sometimes called the Tory Party at prayers.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Seabury_(bishop)
1845 Charles Thurber was issued his second patent for a machine that was a typewriter precursor. This one he named the Chirographer (No. 4272). He is creditted with the first U.S. patent on a typewriter with platen movement and automatic letter spacing, which he patented two years earlier, called "Thurber's Patent Printer" (No. 3,228, 26 Aug 1843).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Thurber_(inventor)
1865 Mark Twain publishes "Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first published in the November 18, 1865, edition of The New York Saturday Press, under the title "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." The story, which has also been published as "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," is set in a gold-mining camp in Calaveras County, California, and has its origins in the folklore of the Gold Rush era. It was one of Twain's earliest writings, and helped establish his reputation as a humorist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of_Calaveras_County
1866 English devotional writer Katherine Hankey, 32, penned the verses that we sing today as the hymn, "I Love to Tell the Story."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Hankey
www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/h/a/n/hankey_ak.htm
1873 A severe storm raged from Georgia to Nova Scotia causing great losses to fishing fleets along the coast. In Maine, the barometric pressure reached 28.49 inches at Portland. (David Ludlum)
1874 National Woman's Christian Temperance Union organizes in Cleveland The Second Presbyterian Church on Wednesday, November 18, 1874, 300 women assembled to establish the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Sixteen states were represented, with 135 women registered as delegates. At this convention, the organization was put in place with elected permanent officers and a constitution.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman%27s_Christian_Temperance_Union
1883 Standard time in the U.S. went into effect at noon for the first time due a decision of the American Railway Association. The actual local time, or "sun time" constantly changes as one moves either east or west. With the arrival of railroad travel, the situation raised problems for railway lines and passengers trying to synchronize schedules in different cities. The need for a system of standardized time was evident. The system adopted was first proposed by Charles F. Dowd (1825 - 1904), a school principal in New York state. North America was divided into four time zones, fifteen degrees of longitude, and one hour of "standard time" apart. Sir Stanford Fleming proposed the extension of the Dowd system to the whole world with 24 time zones.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_time
1893 Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) published the encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which strongly encouraged Roman Catholic educators to teach sound courses in biblical introduction and interpretation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providentissimus_Deus
1894 First newspaper Sunday color comic section published (NY World)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics
1894 Concordia Teachers College (Seward, Nebraska) was dedicated.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_University_(Nebraska)
1903 The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty is signed by the United States and Panama, giving the United States exclusive rights over the Panama Canal Zone.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay-Bunau-Varilla_Treaty
1909 Two United States warships are sent to Nicaragua after 500 revolutionaries (including two Americans) are executed by order of José Santos Zelaya.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Santos_Zelaya
1911 The opera "Lobetanz" 1st American performance
1913 The first airplane in the U.S. to perform a loop-the-loop was piloted by Lincoln Beachey over North Isalnd, San Diego, California. At a level of 1,000 feet, he brought his aircraft up with a swoop and a moment later was flying head downward. He completed the loop at a height of 300 feet. Ten days later he performed a triple loop. Beachey was one of the more colorful characters of early aviation. By 1912, he was a stunt pilot of great repute. His daring acts made him well known in aviation circles. In Chicago, he flew along a string of boxcars first rolling one wheel then the other alternatively along the car roofs as the train was rolling down the tracks. He died in 1915, at age 28, from a crash while performing stunts at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, Cal.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Beachey
1916 World War I: First Battle of the Somme in France, British Expeditionary Force commander Douglas Haig calls off the battle which started on July 1, 1916.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_the_Somme
1925 The Minneapolis Theses were adopted by the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America and by the Ohio, Iowa and Buffalo Synods. The theses formed the doctrinal basis of the American Lutheran Church, organized in 1930, and of The American Lutheran Conference.
cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=m&word=MINNEAPOLISTHESES1
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1926 Pope Pius XI encyclical Iniquis Afflictisque (On the Persecution of the Church in Mexico).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iniquis_Afflictisque
www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_18111926_iniquis-afflictisque_en.html
1926 Pope Pius XI encyclical On the persecution of the Church in Mexico
www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_28021926_rerum-ecclesiae_en.html
1928 Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse debuts in NY in "Steamboat Willie"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse
1929 Large quake in Atlantic [/img]breaks Transatlantic cable
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Grand_Banks_earthquake
1931 Ludwig E. Fuerbringer (1864–1947) became president of Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis).
cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=F&word=FUERBRINGER.LUDWIGERNEST
1932 "Flowers & Trees" receives 1st Academy Award for a cartoon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_%26_Trees
1936 Main span of Golden Gate Bridge joined
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_Bridge#Construction
1938 Trade union members elect John L. Lewis as the first president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Lewis
1940 World War II: German leader Adolf Hitler and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano meet to discuss Benito Mussolini's disastrous invasion of Greece.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galeazzo_Ciano#Foreign_Minister
1940 New York City's "Mad Bomber" George Metesky places his first bomb at a Manhattan office building used by Consolidated Edison.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Metesky
1943 World War II -- Battle of Berlin: 440 Royal Air Force planes bomb Berlin causing only light damage and killing 131. The RAF loses nine aircraft and 53 air crew.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin
1943 1st US ambassador to Canada, Ray Atherton, nominated
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Atherton
1949 Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn Dodgers, named NL's MVP
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Robinson
1950 The first fluoro-record reflector camera was announced. This could make x-ray pictures in one-sixth of the time previously required, and was used for gastro-instestinal surveys. The manufacturer was the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., Jamaica, N.Y.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Camera_and_Instrument
1951 "See it Now" premieres on TV. It was an American newsmagazine and documentary series broadcast by CBS from 1951 to 1958. It was created by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, Murrow being the host of the show. From 1952 to 1957, See It Now won four Emmy Awards and was nominated three other times. It also won a 1952 Peabody Award, which cited its
simple, lucid, intelligent analysis of top news stories of the week on television … a strikingly effective format for presenting news and the personalities involved in the news with humor, sometimes with indignation, always with careful thought.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_It_Now
1955 An early season cold snap finally came to an end. Helena, MT, experienced 138 consecutive hours of subzero temperatures, including a reading of 29 below zero, which surpassed by seven degrees their previous record for the month of November. Missoula MT broke their November record by 12 degrees with a reading of 23 below zero, and Salt Lake City UT smashed their previous November record of zero with a reading of 14 below. Heavy snow in the Great Basin closed Donner Pass CA, and total crop damage from the cold wave amounted to eleven million dollars. (David Ludlum)
1957 A tornado, 100 yards in width, travelled a nearly "straight as an arrow" 27-mile path from near Rosa AL to near Albertville AL, killing three persons. A home in the Susan Moore community in Blount County was picked up and dropped 500 feet away killing one person. (The Weather Channel)
1960 Copyright Office issues its 10 millionth registration
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Office
1961 US Ranger 2 launched to Moon; failed
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_2
1961 United States President John F. Kennedy sends 18,000 military advisors to South Vietnam.
www.blupete.com/Memoirs/Memoirs016.htm
1963 The first telephone in the U.S. with push buttons instead of a rotary dial was placed in commercial service in Carnegie and Greensburg, Pa. This was a Touch-Tone telephone with 10 push buttons, manufactured by the Western Electric Manufacturing and supply Unit of the Bell System. The optional service was offered for an extra charge. Some previous marketing trials had taken place in Ohio and Pennsylvania. A 10 button dial was inserted into an adapter taking the place of the rotary dial. The use of 12 Button dials with * and # keys for special services came out rather quickly after the introduction of Touch Tone Service in 1963, and the 10 button dial was discontinued.
1965 A decree on the Apostolate of the Laity was issued by the Second Vatican Council.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolicam_Actuositatem
1966 This was the last required meatless Friday for American Roman Catholics. In February Pope Paul VI (1897–1978) had made an apostolic decree that prayer or charitable works might be substituted as penance instead of fasting and abstinence. US RC bishops did away with rule against eating meat on Fridays
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_and_abstinence_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Church
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Paul_VI
1970 Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling declared this day that large doses of Vitamin C could ward off the common cold. He proposed that regular intake of vitamin C in amounts far higher than the officially sanctioned RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) could help prevent and shorten the duration of the common cold. He concluded that the optimal daily intake of vitamin C for most people is 2.3 grams to 10 grams daily. Although the medical establishment immediately voiced their strong opposition to this idea, many ordinary people believed Dr. Pauling and began taking large amounts of vitamin C. He wrote a book on the subject Vitamin C and the Common Cold (1970) which became a best-seller.
1970 - U.S. President Richard Nixon asks the U.S. Congress for $155 million USD in supplemental aid for the Cambodian government.
1978 In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple cult to a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo J. Ryan is murdered by members of the Peoples Temple hours earlier.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown,_Guyana
1985 Enterprise (OV-101) turned over to the Smithsonian Institution In 1985, Enterprise was partially disassembled to allow certain components to be reused in other shuttles, then underwent an international tour visiting France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the U.S. states of California, Alabama, and Louisiana. It was also used to fit-check the never-used shuttle launch pad, SLC-6 at Vandenberg AFB, California. Finally, on November 18, 1985, Enterprise was ferried to Washington, D.C., where it became property of the Smithsonian Institution
1986 The first of two successive snowstorms struck the northeastern U.S. The storm produced up to 20 inches of snow in southern New Hampshire. Two days later a second storm produced up to 30 inches of snow in northern Maine. (Storm Data)
1987 It was a windy day across parts of the nation. Gale force winds whipped the Great Lakes Region. Winds gusting to 80 mph in western New York State damaged buildings and flipped over flatbed trailers at Churchville. In Montana, high winds in the Upper Yellowstone Valley gusted to 64 mph at Livingston. Strong Santa Ana winds buffeted the mountains and valleys of southern California. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1987 Iran-Contra Affair: the U.S. Congress issues its final report on the Iran-Contra Affair.
1988 Thunderstorms developing along a warm front drenched Little Rock AR with 7.01 inches of rain, smashing their previous record for the date of 1.91 inches. (The National Weather Summary)
1988 War on Drugs: U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill into law allowing the death penalty for drug traffickers.
1989 - A second surge of arctic air brought record cold to parts of the north central U.S. Eleven cities in the Upper Midwest reported record low temperatures for the date, including Rochester MN with a reading of 4 degrees below zero. Strong winds ushering the arctic air into the north central U.S. produced squalls in the Lower Great Lakes Region. Snowfall totals in northern Ohio ranged up to twenty inches in Ashatabula County and Geauga County. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1991 Muslim Shites release hostages Terry Waite & Thomas Sutherland Births In January 1987 while negotiating for the release of Western hostages in Lebanon, Waite was taken captive and remained in captivity for 1,763 days, the first four years of which were spent in total solitary confinement. Sutherland had been held hostage for 2,354 days.
1993 In the United States, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is ratified by the House of Representatives.
1997 Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays expansion draft The expansion draft for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks is held in Phoenix, Arizona. Florida pitcher Tony Saunders is taken with the 1st pick by the Devil Rays, while the Diamondbacks select pitcher Brian Anderson from Cleveland. Following the draft, the Diamondbacks acquire 3B Travis Fryman from the Tigers in exchange for infielders Joe Randa and Gabe Alvarez and P Matt Drews. They also obtain OF Devon White from the Marlins in exchange for P Jesus Martinez. In a rash of moves, the Devil Rays get 1B Fred McGriff from the Braves in exchange for a player to be named, C John Flaherty from the Padres in exchange for P Brian Boehringer and IF Andy Sheets, SS Kevin Stocker from the Phillies in exchange for Bobby Abreu, and sign free agent P Roberto Hernandez to a 4-year contract.
2003 In a 50-page, 4–3 decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules that the state may not "deny the protections, benefits and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry."
Births
1800 John Nelson Darby, founder and leader of a branch of the Plymouth Brethren, (d 29 Apr 1882).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darby_(evangelist)
1849 Russell Kelso Carter born in Baltimore, and died at Catonsville, Maryland-- and between these two events he was a successful chemistry professor, a sheep rancher, a minister, author, hymn writer, composer, and publisher. To top it off, he became a successful doctor. Our main interest in Carter are the words and music of "Standing on the Promises " among some 68 hymn tunes and 52 poems, most of them found in Hymns of the Christian Life, which he assisted Dr. A. B. Simpson compile for the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/c/a/r/carter_rk.htm
1861 Dorothy Dix (d 1951), was the pseudonym of U.S. journalist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer. As the forerunner of today's popular advice columnists, Dorothy Dix was America's highest paid and most widely read female journalist at the time of her death. Her advice on marriage was syndicated in newspapers around the world. With an estimated audience of 60 million readers, she became a popular and recognized figure on her travels abroad.
1810 Asa Gray (d 1888) America's leading botanist in the mid-19th century, extensively studying North American flora, he did more work than any other botanist to unify the taxonomic knowledge of plants of this region. He was Darwin's strongest early supporter in the U.S.; in 1857, he was the third scientist to be told of his theory (after Hooker and Lyell). He debated L. Agassiz between 1859 and 1861 on variation and geographic distribution Gray's discovery of close affinities between East Asian and North American floras was a key piece of evidence in favor of evolution. Though not fully comfortable with selection, he argued that evolution was compatible with religious belief and slid towards theistic evolutionism. Gray co-authored Flora of North America.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Gray
1874 Clarence Shepard Day, Jr. (d 1935) American author. Day's most famous work is the autobiographical Life with Father (1935), which detailed humorous episodes in his family's life, centering on his domineering father, during the 1890s in New York City. Scenes from the book, along with its 1932 predecessor, God and My Father, and its 1937 sequel, Life with Mother, published posthumously, were the basis for the 1939 play by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, which became one of Broadway's longest-running, non-musical hits. In 1947—the year the play ended on Broadway—William Powell and Irene Dunne portrayed Day's parents in the film of the same name. Life with Father co-starred a young Elizabeth Taylor and an even younger Martin Milner (later one of the two police-officer stars of the 1968 TV series Adam-12), and received Oscar nominations for cinematography, art direction, musical score and best actor (Powell). Life with Father also became a popular 1953–1955 television sitcom.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Day
1883 Carl Vinson (d 1981) United States Representative from Georgia. He was a Democrat and the first person to serve for more than 50 years in the United States House of Representatives. He was known as "The Father of the Two-Ocean Navy".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Vinson
1899 Eugene Ormandy (d 1985) (Jeno Blau) Hungarian-born conductor and violinist.
1899 Howard Thurman (d 10 Apr 1981) influential American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader. He was Dean of Chapel at Howard University and Boston University for more than two decades, wrote 21 books, and in 1944 helped found a multicultural church.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Thurman
1900 George Bogdan Kistiakowsky (d 1982) Russian American chemist who worked on developing the first atomic bomb but later advocated banning nuclear weapons. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1926, and taught chemistry at Princeton University then Harvard (1930-71). He served as special assistant to President Eisenhower for science and technology (1959-61). As head of the explosives division of the Los Alamos Laboratory during WW II (1944-46), he oversaw 600 people developing explosives for the first atom bomb. The conventional explosives are used for its detonation to uniformly compress the plutonium sphere and achieve critical mass. In 1977, he became chairman of the Council for a Livable World, which opposes nuclear war.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bogdan_Kistiakowsky
1901 George Horace Gallup (d 1984) American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion.
1906 George Wald (d 1997) American biochemist who received (with Haldan K. Hartline of the U.S. and Ragnar Granit of Sweden) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1967 for his work on the chemistry of vision. While researching the biochemistry of vision at Harvard University, he disclosed the presence of Vitamin A in the retina of the eye. In later work, he identified visual pigments and their precursors. As a byproduct he described the absorption spectra of the different types of cones serving colour vision. His important discovery of the primary molecular reaction to light in the eye represented a dramatic advance in vision since it plays the role of a trigger in the photoreceptors of all living animals.
1908 Imogene Fernandez de Coca (d 2001) American comic actress best known for her role opposite Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. Starting out in vaudeville as a child acrobat, she studied ballet and wished to have a serious career in music and dance, graduating to decades of stage musical revues, cabaret and summer stock. Finally in her 40s she began a celebrated career as a comedienne in television, starring in six series and guesting on successful television programs from the 1940s to the 1990s. She was nominated for five Emmy awards for Your Show of Shows, winning Best Actress in 1951 and singled out for a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting in 1953. Coca was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1978 for On the Twentieth Century and received a sixth Emmy nomination at the age of 80 for an episode of Moonlighting.
1909 Johnny Mercer, American lyricist (d. 1976)
1923 Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr. (d 1998) America's first man in space and one of only 12 humans who walked on the Moon. Named as one of the nation's original seven Mercury astronauts in 1959, Shepard became the first American into space on 5 May 1961, riding a Redstone rocket on a 15-minute suborbital flight that took him and his Freedom 7 Mercury capsule 115 miles in altitude and 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, FL. (His flight came three weeks after the launch of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who on 12 Apr 1961, became the first human space traveler on a one-orbit flight lasting 108 minutes.) Although the flight of Freedom 7 was brief, it was a major step for U.S. in a race with the USSR.
1923 Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens (d 2010) United States Senator from Alaska, serving from December 24, 1968, until January 3, 2009, and thus the longest-serving Republican senator in history. He was President pro tempore in the 108th and 109th Congresses from January 3, 2003, to January 3, 2007, and the third senator to hold the title of President pro tempore emeritus.
1925 Gene William Mauch (November 18, 1925 – August 8, 2005) was an American infielder and manager in Major League Baseball best known for managing four teams from 1960 to 1987. He is by far the winningest manager to have never won a league pennant (breaking the record formerly held by Jimmy Dykes), three times coming within a single victory. He managed the Philadelphia Phillies (1960-68), Montreal Expos (1969–75, Mauch was their inaugural manager), Minnesota Twins (1976–80), and California Angels (1981–82, 1985–87). His 1,902 career victories ranked 8th in major league history when he retired, and his 3,942 total games ranked 4th. He gained a reputation for playing a distinctive "small ball" style, which emphasized defense, speed and base-to-base tactics on offense rather than power hitting.
1927 Hank Ballard (d 2003), born John Henry Kendricks, rhythm and blues singer, the lead vocalist of Hank Ballard and The Midnighters and one of the first proto-rock 'n' roll artists to emerge in the early 1950s. He played an integral part in the development of rock music, releasing the hit singles "Work With Me, Annie" and answer songs "Annie Had a Baby" and "Annie's Aunt Fannie" with his Midnighters. He later wrote and recorded "The Twist" and invented the dance, which was notably covered by Chubby Checker.
1929 Gianna D'Angelo American coloratura soprano, primarily active in the 1950s and 1960s.
1945 Wilma Pearl Mankiller (d 2010) first female Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She served as the Principal Chief for ten years from 1985 to 1995.
Deaths
1899 August Reinke, pioneer of deaf ministry, (b 29 Sep 1841).
cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=R&word=REINKE.AUGUST
1886 Chester A. Arthur, 21st President of the United States (b. 1829) Arthur was a member of the Republican Party and worked as a lawyer before becoming the 20th Vice President under James Garfield. While Garfield was mortally wounded by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881, he did not die until September 19 of that year, at which time Arthur was sworn in as president, serving until March 4, 1885.
1898 John Ernst Worrell Keely (b 1827) fraudulent American inventor. In 1873 he announced that he had discovered a new physical force that, if harnessed, would produce unheard-of power. He claimed, for example, to be able to produce from a quart of water enough fuel to move a 30-car train from Philadelphia to New York City. He began construction of an engine to perform this feat and by 1874 was able to give preliminary demonstrations of his machine. He made a great show of guarding the secret of the motor he was developing to obtain power "from intermolecular vibrations of ether," and scientists and engineers scoffed at his unverified claims.
1949 Frank Baldwin Jewett (b 1879) U.S. electrical engineer who directed research as the first president of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., (1925-40). Jewett believed that the best science and technology result from bringing together and nurturing the best minds. Under his tenure Bell Labs laid the foundation for a new scientific discipline, radio astronomy, and transformed movies by synchronizing sound to pictures. Bell Labs was the first to transmit television over a long distance in the U.S. and designed the first electrical digital computer. Bell Labs won its first Nobel Prize in physics for fundamental work demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
1978 James Warren "Jim" Jones (b 1931) founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 suicide of more than 900 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip.
1978 Leo Joseph Ryan, Jr. (b 1925) American politician of the Democratic Party. He served as a U.S. Representative from the 11th Congressional District of California from 1973 until he was murdered in Guyana by members of the Peoples Temple shortly before the Jonestown Massacre in 1978.
1994 Cabell "Cab" Calloway III (b 1907) American jazz singer and bandleader. He was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s. Calloway's band featured performers including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry, New Orleans guitar ace Danny Barker, and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform until his death in 1994 at the age of 86.
Christian Feast Day:
Abhai of Hach (Syriac Orthodox Church)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhai_of_Hach
Dedication of the Basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Basilica
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Saint_Paul_Outside_the_Walls
Juthwara (Roman Catholic Church)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juthwara
Mabyn (Roman Catholic Church and Anglican communion)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabyn
Rose Philippine Duchesne (Roman Catholic Church)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Philippine_Duchesne
November 18 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Saints
Martyr Platon of Ancyra (266)
atlantaserbs.com/learnmore/ThisMonthInOrthodoxy-December.htm
Romanus of Caesarea, deacon (303)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanus_of_Caesarea
Barulas, child martyr (303)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barulas
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daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
www.todayinsci.com/11/11_18.htm
www.weatherforyou.com/cgi-bin/weather_history/today2S.pl
www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/c/a/r/carter_rk.htm
www.christianhistorytimeline.com/lives_events/birthday/index.php
www.amug.org/~jpaul/nov18.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_18
www.scopesys.com/cgi-bin/today2.cgi
www.hymntime.com/tch/index.htm
www.lutheranhistory.org/history/tih1118.htm
www.lcms.org/
www.cyberhymnal.org/index.htm#lk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_18_(Eastern_Orthodox_liturgics)