Nov. 14
1851: Herman Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick; Or The Whale” was published in the United States.
1889: Journalist Nellie Bly began an attempt to travel around the world in 80 days; she would complete the journey in a little more than 72 days.
1940: During World War II, German bombing raids destroyed much of the English city of Coventry.
1970: A chartered Southern Airways plane crashed while trying to land in West Virginia, killing all 75 people on board, including the Marshall University football team and its coaching staff.
Nov. 15
1777: The Second Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation.
1864: Union forces led by Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman began their “March to the Sea” from Atlanta.
1959: Four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, were found murdered in their home. (The convicted killers were hanged in a case made famous by the Truman Capote book “In Cold Blood.”)
Nov. 16
1907: Oklahoma became the 46th state of the union.
1914: The newly created Federal Reserve Banks opened in 12 cities.
2001: The first film in the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (U.S. title: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”) debuted in theaters around the world.
Nov. 17
1800: Congress held its first session in the partially completed U.S. Capitol building.
1869: The Suez Canal opened in Egypt.
2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in as the 38th governor of California.
Nov. 18
1883: The United States and Canada adopted a system of Standard Time zones.
1963: The Bell System introduced the first commercial touch-tone telephone system in Carnegie and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
1985: The comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” created by Bill Watterson, was first published. (The strip ran for 10 years.)
1978: U.S. Rep. Leo J. Ryan of California and four others were killed on an airstrip in Jonestown, Guyana, by members of the Peoples Temple; the killings were followed by a night of mass murder and suicide resulting in the deaths of more than 900 cult members.
Nov. 19
1863: President Abraham Lincoln dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.
1919: The U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles by a vote of 55 in favor and 39 against, short of the two-thirds majority needed for ratification.
2017: Charles Manson, the hippie cult leader behind the gruesome murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles in 1969, died in a California hospital at age 83 after nearly a half-century in prison.
Nov. 20
1789: New Jersey became the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights.
1945: Twenty-two former Nazi officials went on trial before an international war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. (Almost a year later, the International Military Tribune sentenced 12 of the defendants to death).
1947: Britain’s future queen, Princess Elizabeth, married Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey.
1985: The first version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, Windows 1.0, was officially released.