1770 – James Bruce discovers what he believes to be the source of the Nile. James Bruce was a Scottish traveler and travel writer who spent more than a dozen years in North Africa and Ethiopia, where he traced the origins of the Blue Nile.
 |
 |
|
Herman Melville |
1851 – Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville is published in America.
Born in Lower Manhattan at 6 Pearl Street in 1819, he as the third child of a merchant in French dry goods. Within two years, Allan Melvill moved his wife and three children to their own house at 55 Cortlandt Street, staffed with a cook, nurse, houseman, and later a governess. Melville’s formal education ended abruptly after his father died in 1832, leaving the family in financial straits. Melville briefly became a schoolteacher before he took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship.
1889 – Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days.
1910 – Aviator Eugene Burton Ely performs the first takeoff from a ship in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He took off from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in a Curtiss pusher.
1914 – The Ottoman Empire declares war against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro during the early months of World War I.
1940 – World War II: In England, Coventry is heavily bombed by German Luftwaffe bombers. Coventry Cathedral is almost completely destroyed.
1957 – The “Apalachin Meeting” in rural Tioga County in upstate New York is raided by law enforcement; many high level Mafia figures are arrested while trying to flee.
|
 |
|
Ruby Bridges |
1960 – Ruby Bridges becomes the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in Louisiana.Ruby Nell Bridges Hall is an American activist known for being the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960.
1969 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12, the second crewed mission to the surface of the Moon. Launched on November 14th, Apollo 12 was a mission that lasted ten days following the triumphant voyage of Apollo 11, a few months earlier. Their mission had several objectives…to perform a survey of the landing site and to collect geological sample. They landed near the unmanned Surveyor III and collected a few parts from it to take back to earth for study. This second landing also including getting a better understanding of work in the lunar environment and to develop further techniques for proper landing on the moon’s surface. The crew consisted of Mission commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean and Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon who remained in lunar orbit for just over one day and seven hours.
1979 – Iran hostage crisis: President Jimmy Carter issues Executive order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.
1765 – Robert Fulton, American engineer, invented the steamboat (d. 1815)
1840 – Claude Monet, French painter (d. 1926)
1908 – Joseph McCarthy, American captain, lawyer, and politician (d. 1957)
1922 – Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egyptian politician and diplomat, 6th Secretary General of the United Nations (d. 2016)
1947 – Buckwheat Zydeco, American accordion player (d. 2016) Stanley Dural, Jr., better known by his stage name Buckwheat Zydeco, was an American accordionist and zydeco musician. He was one of the few zydeco artists to achieve mainstream success
1948 – Charles, Prince of Wales
1954 – Condolezza Rice, American political scientist, academic, and politician, 66th United States Secretary of State
1864 – Franz Müller, German tailor and murderer (b. 1840)
1915 – Booker T. Washington, educator, essayist and historian (b. 1856)