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.
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.