November 18
There are
43 days days remaining in 2016, and they cannot go by fast enough.
There are
36 days until Christmas.
Events
401 – The Visigoths, led by king Alaric I, cross the Alps and invade northern Italy.
1307 – According to legend, William Tell shoots an apple off his son's head.
1421 – A seawall at the Zuiderzee dike in the Netherlands breaks, flooding 72 villages and killing about 10,000 people. This event will be known as St. Elizabeth's flood.
1865 – Mark Twain's short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is published in the New York Saturday Press.
1883 – American and Canadian railroads institute five standard continental time zones, ending the confusion of thousands of local times.
1903 – The Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty is signed by the United States and Panama, giving the United States exclusive rights over the Panama Canal Zone.
1928 – Release of the animated short Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. This is considered by the Disney corporation to be Mickey's birthday.
1929 – Grand Banks earthquake: Off the south coast of Newfoundland in the Atlantic Ocean, a Richter magnitude 7.2 submarine earthquake, centered on the Grand Banks, breaks 12 submarine transatlantic telegraph cables and triggers a tsunami that destroys many south coast communities in the Burin Peninsula.
1961 – United States President John F. Kennedy sends 18,000 military advisors to South Vietnam.
1963 – The first push-button telephone goes into service.
1978 – In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple to a mass murder–suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo Ryan is murdered by members of the Peoples Temple hours earlier.
1982 – Duk Koo Kim dies from injuries sustained during a 14-round match against Ray Mancini in Las Vegas, prompting reforms in the sport of boxing.
2003 – The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules 4–3 in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that the state's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional and gives the state legislature 180 days to change the law making Massachusetts the first state in the United States to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples.
Births
1787 – Louis Daguerre; 1810 – Asa Gray; 1836 – W. S. Gilbert; 1861 – Dorothy Dix; 1883 – Carl Vinson; 1901 – George Gallup; 1908 – Imogene Coca; 1909 – Johnny Mercer; 1923 – Alan Shepard; 1923 – Ted Stevens; 1927 – Hank Ballard; 1939 – Brenda Vaccaro; 1942 – Linda Evans; 1942 – Susan Sullivan; 1947 – Jameson Parker; 1949 – Herman Rarebell; 1950 – Graham Parker; 1950 – Rudy Sarzo; 1952 – Delroy Lindo; 1953 – Kevin Nealon; 1954 – John Parr; 1959 – Cindy Blackman; 1962 – Kirk Hammett; 1963 – Len Bias; 1974 – Chloë Sevigny; 1980 – Denny Hamlin; 1984 – Johnny Christ
Deaths
1886 – Chester A. Arthur; 1922 – Marcel Proust; 1962 – Niels Bohr; 1969 – Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.; 1972 – Danny Whitten; 1976 – Man Ray; 1978 – Jim Jones; 1978 – Leo Ryan; 1994 – Cab Calloway; 2002 – James Coburn; 2005 – Harold J. Stone;
2006 - My Best Friend, John