On November 12th...

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1790 Letitia Christian, future wife of U.S. President John Tyler, was born.

1799 Andrew Ellicott made the first known record of a meteor shower observation in the United States.

1815 American social reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born.

1820 José de San Martín captured Huacho, Peru.

1823 The Great North Holland Canal opened.

1840 Sculptor François-Auguste-René Rodin was born.

1842 Physicist John William Strutt was born.

1846 William T.G. Morton and Charles T. Jackson were granted a patent for the use of sulfuric ether as an anesthetic.

1847 Sir James Young Simpson became the first to use chloroform as an anaesthetic.

1859 Jules Leotard performed the first ever flying trapeze act.

1866 Sun Yat-sen, President of China, was born.

1892 William "Pudge" Heffelfinger became the first professional football player when Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Athletic Association paid him $500 to play in a game against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club.

1900 The Exposition Universelle closed in Paris, France.

1906 Alberto Santos-Dumont became the first person to set an aviation record in Europe.

1908 Harry Blackmun was born.

1908 U. S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Andrew Blackmun was born.

1911 Wilbur Dorsey Clayton, American jazz musician, was born.

1912 The bodies of the members of Scott's Antarctic expedition were found.

1915 Great Britain annexed the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.
1915 Haiti approved a treaty making it a protectorate of the United States.

1916 Astronomer Percival Lowell died.

1918 Austria became a republic.

1922 Actress Kim Hunter was born.

1929 Actress Grace Kelly was born.

1933 Richard Rogers Bawker, editor, author, and publisher, died.
1933 The first known photograph of the Loch Ness Monster was taken.

1934 Murderous cult leader Charles Manson was born.

1935 Egas Moniz performed the world's first prefontal lobotomy.

1936 The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened to traffic.

1938 U.S. diplomat Delano E. Lewis was born.

1942 The Battle of Guadalcanal began.

1944 Sportscaster Al Michaels was born.

1945 Musician Neil Young was born.
1945 Composer Jerome Kern died.

1946 The first drive-up bank window was opened by the Exchange National Bank in Chicago.
1946 Walt Disney's Song of South was released.

1948 Japanese premier Hideki Tojo was sentenced to death by a war crimes tribunal.

1954 The U.S. immigration processing center on Ellis Island closed.

1961 Nadia Comaneci, Olympic gymnast, was born.

1963 Ólafur Thors announced his resignation as Prime Minister of Iceland due to ill health.

1964 Grand Duchess Charlotte ended her 45-year rule in Luxembourg and was succeeded by Crown Prince Jean.

1965 The Soviet Union launched Venera 2 toward Venus.

1966 A total eclipse of the Sun was widely observed, and studied, in South America.
1966 Actor David Schwimmer was born.

1968 Baseball player Sammy Sosa was born.

1969 Figure skater Tanya Harding was born.

1977 Ernest Morial was elected as the first black mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana.

1980 Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Saturn.
1980 Actor Ryan Gosling was born.

1981 The Double Eagle 2 completed the first ever balloon crossing of the Pacific Ocean.

1982 Actress Anne Hathaway was born.

1984 Space shuttle astronauts carried out the first ever "space salvage" operation.

1986 Former Nazi official Erich Koch died.

1988 Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, U.S. and NATO General, died.

1989 Brazil held its firstfree presidential election in 29 years.

1990 Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal for creation of a "World Wide Web."
1990 Crown Prince Akihito was formally installed as Emperor of Japan.
1990 Actress Eve Arden died.

1993 Baseball player Bill Dickey died.
1993 H. R. Haldeman, U.S. President Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, died.

1994 Track and field star Wilma Rudolph died.

1995 Chris Hadfield became the first Canadian to go into space.

2001 An American Airlines Airbus A300 crashed soon after taking off from JFK International Airport in New York, New York, killing all 260 persons aboard and 5 persons on the ground.

2003 Actress Penny Singleton died.

2007 Novelist Ira Levin died.

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This page was last updated on November 12, 2018.