Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Today in History....November 21

* 1620, Plymouth Colony settlers sign the Mayflower Compact

* 1783, in Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis d'Arlandes, make the first untethered hot air balloon flight

* 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis appoints Judah Benjamin secretary of war

* 1877, Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound

* 1905, Albert Einstein's paper, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", is published in the journal "Annalen der Physik".
This paper reveals the relationship between energy and mass. This leads to the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (squared).

* 1941, the radio program King Biscuit Time is broadcast for the first time (it would later become the longest running daily radio broadcast in history and the most famous live blues radio program)

* 1953, authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce that the "Piltdown Man" skull, held to be one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, was a hoax

* 1964, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opens to traffic (at the time it was the world's longest suspension bridge). ALSO: Second Vatican
Council: The third session of the Roman Catholic Church's ecumenical council closes

* 1969, US President Richard Nixon and Japanese Premier Eisaku Sato agree in Washington, DC on the return of Okinawa to Japanese control in 1972. Under terms of the agreement, the US is to retain its rights to bases on the island, but these are to be nuclear-free

* 1970, a joint Air Force and Army team raids the Son Tay prison camp in an attempt to free American POWs thought to be held there

* 1973, President Nixon's attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate.

* 1980, a deadly fire breaks out at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada (now Bally's Las Vegas). 87 people are killed and more than 650 are injured in the worst disaster in Nevada history

* 1995, the Dayton Peace Agreement was initialed in the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, ending three and a half years of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The agreement was formally ratified in Paris, on December 14 that same year

* 1995, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 5,000 (5,023.55) for the first time

* 1985, Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released

* 1989, the start of the Velvet Revolution, when the number of protesters assembled in Prague, Czechoslovakia swells from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million

* 1994, the Angolan government and UNITA rebels sign the Lusaka Protocol in Zambia, ending 19 years of civil war (localized fighting resumed the next year)

* 2002, 11 bus passengers were killed after a practitioner of that "religion of peace" blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem

* 2006, Lebanon's industry minister, Pierre Gemayel, scion of Lebanon's most prominent Christian family, was assassinated in a brazen daytime hit by a practitioner of that "religion of peace"

2 Comments:

At 8:44 AM, Blogger Brooke said...

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, Joe!

 
At 11:50 AM, Blogger Joe Gringo said...

Thanks Brooke, back at 'ya!

 

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