On November 11, 1921, in a solemn ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, President Warren G. Harding dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, honoring an unidentified American serviceman who had died in World War I. The tomb, situated prominently on a hill overlooking Washington,…
Read MoreOn November 11, 1967—at a moment when the Vietnam War had already metastasized from a military conflict into a sprawling contest over national resolve—the Viet Cong staged one of the most striking propaganda rituals of the era. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, three American prisoners…
Read MoreOn November 11, 1923, German authorities arrested Adolf Hitler following the Beer Hall Putsch, marking a pivotal event that could have shifted the direction of world history and changed the lives of tens of millions. The Beer Hall Putsch, which occurred on November 8-9,…
Read MoreOn November 10, 1202, the men of the Fourth Crusade stood aboard their ships and gazed up at the walls of Zara, a port on the Adriatic coast in what is now Croatia. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, a French knight who sailed with the expedition,…
Read MoreThe creation of the United States Marine Corps on November 10, 1775, at Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern stands as one of the most durable institutional legacies of the American Revolution. Conceived in the early weeks of the war—when the Continental Congress urgently sought to build…
Read MoreKristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, unfolded on the night of November 9 and 10, 1938, marking a horrifying turning point in the persecution of Jews during the Nazi era in Germany. Triggered by the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom…
Read MoreThe Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, often referred to as the Wilmington Race Riot, is a pivotal but often overlooked chapter in American history. It stands as the only instance of a municipal government being forcibly overthrown in the United States. On November 10, 1898,…
Read MoreOn November 9, during the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) computers and the Alternate National Military Command Center at Fort Ritchie, Maryland, sounded a chilling alarm. The automated systems detected…
Read MoreThe events of November 9, 1307, sit at the center of one of medieval Europe’s most enduring political dramas: the suppression of the Knights Templar. On that day, Hugues de Pairaud—one of the order’s highest-ranking officers in France—was compelled under duress to issue a…
Read MoreOn November 8, 1861, the Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward found themselves caught in one of the most important diplomatic conflicts during the Civil War. Called the “The Trent Affair,” the incident involved the interception of a British mail steamer, the RMS Trent,…
Read More