1202 – Fourth Crusade: Despite letters from Pope Innocent III forbidding it and threatening excommunication, Catholic crusaders begin a siege of Zara (now Zadar, Croatia).
1580 – After a three-day siege, the English Army beheads over 600 people, including papal soldiers and civilians, at Dún an Óir, Ireland.
1766 – The last colonial governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, signs the charter of Queen’s College (later renamed Rutgers University).
1847 – The passenger ship Stephen Whitney is wrecked in thick fog off the southern coast of Ireland, killing 92 of the 110 on board. The disaster results in the construction of the Fastnet Rock lighthouse.
1871 – Henry Morton Stanley locates missing explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone in Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, famously greeting him with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”.
1918 – The Western Union Cable Office in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, receives a top-secret coded message from Europe (that would be sent to Ottawa and Washington, D.C.) that said on November 11, 1918, all fighting would cease on land, sea and in the air.
1951 – With the rollout of the North American Numbering Plan, direct-dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States.
1958 – The Hope Diamond is donated to the Smithsonian Institution by New York diamond merchant Harry Winston.
1970 – Vietnam War: Vietnamization: For the first time in five years, an entire week ends with no reports of American combat fatalities in Southeast Asia.
1972 – Southern Airways Flight 49 from Birmingham, Alabama is hijacked and, at one point, is threatened with crashing into the nuclear installation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After two days, the plane lands in Havana, Cuba, where the hijackers are jailed by Fidel Castro.
1975 – The 729-foot-long freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks during a storm on Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew on board.
1983 – Bill Gates introduces Windows 1.0.
1989 – Germans begin to tear down the Berlin Wall.
2008 – Over five months after landing on Mars, NASA declares the Phoenix mission concluded after communications with the lander were lost.
Births
1483 – Martin Luther, German monk and priest, leader of the Protestant Reformation (d. 1546)
1810 – George Jennings, English plumber and engineer, invented the flush toilet (d. 1882)
1932 – Roy Scheider, American actor (d. 2008)
Deaths
1727 – Alphonse de Tonty, French-American sailor and explorer (b. 1659)
1982 – Leonid Brezhnev, Ukrainian-Russian general and politician, 4th Head of State of the Soviet Union (b. 1906)
2001 – Ken Kesey, American novelist, essayist, and poet (b. 1935)
2007 – Norman Mailer, American novelist and essayist (b. 1923)
