On November 15th...

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1397 Pope Nicholas V was born.

1594 Naval commander and adventurer Martin Frobisher died.

1630 Astronomer Johannes Kepler died.

1708 British statesman William Pitt was born.

1738 Astronomer William Herschel was born.

1763 Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon began surveying the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

1776 Swedish educator and poet Per Henrik Ling was born.

1777 The Articles of Confederation were approved by the Continental Congress.

1787 Composer Christoph Willibald Gluck died.

1791 The first Catholic college in the United States, Georgetown, opened.

1806 Zebulon Pike sighted the peak that now bears his name.
1806 The first U.S. college magazine, Yale Literary Government, published its first issue.

1827 The Creek Nation lost all of its land in the United States.

1828 Businessman R. T. French was born.

1839 Inventor William Murdock died.

1858 The last debate between Illinois senatorial contenders Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas took place.

1862 Playwright Gerhart Hauptmann was born.

1864 Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman began his "March to the Sea."
1864 Columbia University opened the first school of mining in the United States.

1869 The United States Post Office formally inaugurated free mail delivery.

1881 The American Federation of Labor was founded.

1882 Jurist Felix Frankfurter was born.

1887 Painter Georgia O'Keeffe was born.

1891 W. Averell Harriman, U.S. politician and diplomat, was born.
1891 German tank commander Erwin Rommel was born.

1897 John Mercer Langston, the first African-American to be elected to public office in the United States, died.

1905 Conductor Mantovanni was born.

1906 U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay was born.

1917 Sociologist Émile Durkheim died.

1919 Original "People's Court" judge Joseph Wapner was born.

1920 The League of Nations Assembly met for the first time in Geneva.

1929 The Ambassador Bridge, linking Detroit, Michigan, with Windsor, Ontario, opened to traffic.
1929 Actor Edward Asner was born.

1931 Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki was born.

1932 Singer Petula Clark was born.

1935 Manuel Quezon was inaugurated as the first President of the Philippines.

1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial.

1940 New York City's Midtown Tunnel, linking Manhattan and Queens, opened to traffic.
1940 Actor Sam Waterston was born.

1951 Actress Beverly D'Angelo was born.

1952 Wrestler Randy Savage was born.

1954 Actor Lionel Barrymore died.

1957 A British airliner crashed on the Isle of Wight, killing 43 of the 58 persons aboard.
1957 Convicted spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was sentenced to 30 years in prison and fined $3,000.
1957 The A.F. of L.-C.I.O. suspended the Bakery Workers Union.
1957 Musician Kevin Eubanks was born.

1958 The world's largest tanker, the Princess Sophia, was launched at the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company's Fore River Shipyard.
1958 Actor Tyrone Power died.

1959 Four members of the Clutter Family were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas.
1959 The bathyscape Trieste reached a record depth of 16,800 feet off the island of Guam.

1960 The U.S.S. George Washington, the first U.S. submarine armed with thermonuclear missiles, sailed from Charleston, South Carolina, on its first patrol.

1963 Ibrahim Abboud, military leader of the Sudan, resigned in favor of a provisional civilian government.

1964 A Bonanza Air Lines turboprop F-27 crashed on a mountain southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, during a snowstorm, killing 29 persons.

1966 The last flight of the Gemini space program came to an end with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

1969 The first Wendys Hamburgers restaurant opened.

1978 Anthropologist Margaret Mead died.

1996 Alger Hiss, accused Communist and spy, died.

1998 Civil rights advocate Stokely Carmichael died.

2003 Actress Dorothy Loudon died.

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This page was last updated on November 16, 2018.