On November 23, 534 BC, in the city of Athens during the festival of the Great Dionysia, a figure from the rural deme of Icaria stepped onto a wooden platform and changed the trajectory of Western storytelling. His name was Thespis. By tradition—and according…
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On November 22, 1943, as the Second World War entered what Allied leaders increasingly believed would be its decisive phase, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek gathered in Cairo to confront the future of the war against Japan—and,…
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November 21, 1920, entered the lexicon of Irish history as “Bloody Sunday,” a day when violence in the Irish War of Independence erupted with unprecedented ferocity and irreversible consequences. In the space of a few hours, the conflict between the Irish Republican Army (IRA)…
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On November 20, 1989, the streets of Prague heaved with a force that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia could no longer ignore. What had begun just days earlier as a cautious student demonstration against one-party rule had become a tidal wave of nearly 500,000…
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On November 19, 1999, a soft-spoken Internal Revenue Service employee from Connecticut accomplished something no contestant had ever done before on American television: John Carpenter became the first person to win the top prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, capturing the $1…
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On November 18, 1903, the United States secured sweeping control over a ten-mile-wide corridor in Panama, completing an agreement that cleared the way for construction of an interoceanic canal and placed the strategic waterway under near-total American authority. The Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, signed in Washington…
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On November 17, 2019, a 55-year-old resident of Hubei Province sought medical attention for an unusual respiratory illness after visiting a market in Wuhan. At the time, the episode attracted no broader notice. China’s vast health-care system regularly confronts flurries of seasonal pneumonias—nothing about…
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The French Revolution’s descent into ideological fury was neither sudden nor unforeseeable; its logic of purification had been incubating for years. By the autumn of 1793, as the radical Jacobin government tightened its grip on the Republic, the revolutionary promise of liberty and citizenship…
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On November 15, 1842, before dawn at Webbers Falls in the Cherokee Nation, a group of enslaved men, women, and children made a collective decision that would reverberate across Indian Territory. They locked their Cherokee owners in their homes, seized guns and ammunition, gathered…
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On a damp, gray Tuesday evening that did little to distinguish itself from any other in the British capital, a quiet technological revolution began. At precisely 6:00 p.m., the British Broadcasting Company — a consortium of leading wireless manufacturers — officially launched its first…
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