Author: Redactor

On November 20, 1910, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Russian author of several classic novels, including War and Peace, and novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, died. Late in his life he wrote a Letter to a Hindoo and the essay The Kingdom of God Is Within You that later served as a major influence on Mohandes K. Gandhi and the non-violent independence movement in India.

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the ceremonial dedication of the military cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, appropriating an old phraseology for republican government — “of the people, by the people, for the people” — and giving it its most memorable usage.

On the same date in 1955, National Review published its first issue.

On November 18, 1307, William Tell shot a crossbow bolt to pierce an apple, toppling it off his son’s head. He was forced to do this by the local Austrian authority, whose hat hung on a pole in the Altdorf town square Tell had refused to bow to when entering the village. Tell endures as a Swiss folk hero, and provides the subject of a famous opera by Rossini — the music of which is associated with, in many ears, Bugs Bunny and the Lone Ranger.

In 1926, George Bernard Shaw formally refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize for Literature, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”