Category: Today

On November 24, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed by Jack Ruby while in custody. 

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, 164 BC, Judas Maccabeus, son of Mattathias of the Hasmonean family, rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem. This event is commemorated each year by the festival of Hanukkah. In the Hebrew calendar, this rededication is marked as taking place on 25 Kislev 3597.

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.

1794: The United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain signed Jay’s Treaty, which attempts to resolve some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War.

1808: The Convention of Olkijoki in Raahe ended hostilities in Finland.

1863: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.