TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: NOVEMBER 21
164 BC During Maccabbean revolt Judas Maccabaeus recaptures Jersusalem and rededicates the Second Temple, commemorated since as Jewish festival Hanukkah
1620 Leaders of the Mayflower expedition frame the “Mayflower Compact,” designed to bolster unity among the settlers.
1654 Richard Johnson, a free black, granted 550 acres in Virginia
1789 North Carolina ratifies the Constitution, becoming the 12th state to do it.
1818 Russia’s Tsar Alexander I petitions for a Jewish state in Palestine
1855 Franklin Colman, a pro-slavery Missourian, guns down Charles Dow, a Free Stater from Ohio, near Lawrence, Kansas.
1906 In San Juan, President Theodore Roosevelt pledges citizenship for Puerto Rican people.
1911 Suffragettes storm Parliament in London. All are arrested and all choose prison terms.
1917 German ace Rudolf von Eschwege is killed over Macedonia when he attacks a booby-trapped observation balloon packed with explosives.
1920 Bloody Sunday in Ireland. A key event in the Irish War of Independence, which was a conflict between the British government and Irish revolutionaries in Ireland, Bloody Sunday began with the killings of 14 people by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) under the leadership of Michael Collins. Two other violent incidents against civilian and IRA members during the day added to the death count, which was over 30 by the end of the day.
1922 Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia was sworn in as the first woman to serve as a member of the U.S. Senate.
1927 Police turn machine guns on striking Colorado mine workers, killing five and wounding 20.
1942 Tweety Bird makes its debut
1962 War between China and India ends. The month long war began over a border dispute between the two countries and ended with a unilateral ceasefire by the Chinese.
1963 U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, arrived in San Antonio, TX. They were beginning an ill-fated, two-day tour of Texas that would end in Dallas.
1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the air quality act, allotting $428 million for the fight against pollution.
1973 U.S. President Richard M. Nixon’s attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, announced the presence of an 18½-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to the Watergate case.
1979 Mob burns down US embassy in Pakistan. The mob was allegedly incensed by a rumor that the United States was involved in an attack on a mosque in the holy city of Mecca.
1980 An estimated 83 million viewers tuned in to find out “who shot J.R.” on the CBS prime-time soap opera Dallas. Kristin was the character that fired the gun
1985 US Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard arrested for spying and passing classified information to Israel; he received a life sentence on Nov. 1, 1987.
1992 U.S. Senator Bob Packwood, issued an apology but refused to discuss allegations that he’d made unwelcome sexual advances toward 10 women in past years.
1995 The Dayton Peace Agreement is initialed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio; the agreement, formally ratified in Paris on Dec. 14, ends the three-and-a-half year war between Bosnia and Herzegovina.
2001 Microsoft Corp. proposed giving $1 billion in computers, software, training and cash to more than 12,500 of the poorest schools in the U.S. The offer was intended as part of a deal to settle most of the company’s private antitrust lawsuits.
2002 Nigeria, An angry crowd of people set fire to and stabbed riot demonstrators. This incident took place after it was announced by an Islamic news publication that the Miss World Beauty Pageant would have been accepted by Islam’s founding prophet.
2004 Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts File For Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection
2004 The “Paris Club” “an informal group of financial officials from 19 of the world’s richest countries” agrees to write off $31 billion of Iraq’s external debt to members of the “Paris Club”
2011 Russian hackers were able to destroy a water pump in Illinois by turning it on and off repeatedly until it broke.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
