Category: Today

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.

On this day in 1833, Denison Olmsted was alerted by his neighbors to something truly amazing, a night sky filled with shooting stars.

Not just a one or two or a dozen or a hundred: 72,000 or more per hour. Though recognizing where among the constellations meteors came from was ancient knowledge, it had not been recorded by modern-era scientists, at least in this case. What Olmsted noticed was that the meteors were coming from one point in the sky, the constellation Leo. This regular meteor event is now called the Leonid meteor stream.

In the morning, Olmsted wrote a brief report on the meteor storm for the New Haven Daily Herald newspaper, which elicited correspondence from around the country, thus beginning a social storm, in a sense: crowd-sourced science.

On November 12, 1905, Norwegians established, by referendum, a monarchy — not a republic. Exactly 14 years later, to the day, Austria became a republic.

On November 11, 1889, the State of Washington was admitted as the 42nd State of the United States.

In 1918, German officials signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car in the forest of Compiègne, France. The fighting officially ended at 11:00 a.m. — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919.

In 1921 on this date, U.S. President Warren G. Harding dedicated the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.

On November 10, 1821, the First Cry of Independence in the small, interior town of Villa de los Santos, occurred in Panama. The November 10 date has since become Panama’s “Cry of Independence Day” in the country.

On November 9, 1960, Robert McNamara was named president of the Ford Motor Company, becoming the first non-Ford family member to serve in that post — only to resign a month later to join the newly elected John F. Kennedy administration.