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.
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, 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 November 14, 1777, after 16 months of debate, the Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation.
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.