Category: Today

On November 18, 1307, legend has it, 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, on this date, 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.”

On November 17, 1777, the Articles of Confederation were submitted to the states for ratification.

On that date in 1800, the United States Congress held its first session in Washington, D.C.

On November 16, 1532, Francisco Pizarro and his men captured Inca Emperor Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca.

In 1811 on this date, John Bright (pictured above), English academic and politician, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was born. Bright (d. 1889), famously worked with Richard Cobden against the Corn Laws (repealed in 1846) as well as for the Cobden – Chevalier Treaty of 1860, which ushered in freer trade and closer interdependence between Britain and France.

On November 15, 1777, the Continental Congress approved, and sent to the states for ratification, the “Articles of Confederation — after 16 months of deliberation. The first article gave the official name of the confederacy:

The Stile of this Confederacy shall be
The United States of America.

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.