Category: Today

On November 23, 1644, British poet John Milton published Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.

Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644).

The name “Areopagitica” references a speech by Isocrates, the “Areopagitikós” that itself referenced a hill in Athens, Greece, the Areopagus, which had been the site of an important tribunal that the Greek orator had hoped to restore. It may also refer to the defense that St. Paul made before the Areopagus against charges of promulgating alien gods and outré teachings (see Acts 17:18–34).

On November 22, 1307, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets.

This was a little over a month after France’s King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The liquidation of the order of the Templars was a major event of the late Middle Ages.

On what we would now render as November 21, 1620, Plymouth Colony settlers signed the Mayflower Compact. In the Old Style calendar, the date was November Eleventh.

On November 20, 1789, the state of New Jersey led the way to establishing the Bill of Rights by being the first U.S. state to ratify the document.

Actually, the state ratified on that date Article One of the original twelve, which has yet to be fully ratified as a constitutional amendment, and Articles Three through Twelve, which became the ten articles of the Bill of Rights. On May 7, 1992, the state ratified Article Two, which became the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution.

On November 19, 2021, President Joe Biden temporarily transferred his powers and duties to Vice President Kamala Harris before undergoing a colonoscopy, making her acting president from 10:10 a.m. until 11:35 a.m. This was the first time a woman held the powers and duties of the president of the United States.

Biden had a benign but pre-cancerous polyp removed from his colon during that procedure.

November 18, 1493, Columbus caught first sight of the island now known as Puerto Rico.

The United States Congress held its first session in Washington, D.C., on November 17, 1800.

On November 16, 1914, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opened.

On November 15, 1777, after 16 months of debate, the Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation.

On November 14, 1851 — Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville — was published in the United States of America. The book was first published in three volumes as The Whale in London in October, and under its definitive title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, in a single-volume edition in New York in mid-November. The London publisher, Richard Bentley, censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change of the title for the New York edition. The whale itself appears in the text of both editions as “Moby Dick,” without the hyphen.