Historical Events on November 16

Events 1 - 200 of 201

• 534 Second and final revision of the Justinian Code published, a codified set of imperial and classical laws begun initially in 528
• 1491 The case of the 'Holy Child of La Guardia', involving the kidnapping and murdering a Christian boy, concludes with public burning at the stake of nine Jews in Ávila, Spain
• 1519 City of Havana moved to its current location to avoid mosquito infestations

• 1572 Troops under Don Frederik (the Spanish General Fadrique Alvarez de Toledo) occupy and plunder Zutphen, Netherlands

• 1676 1st colonial prison organized in Nantucket, Massachusetts
• 1677 French troops occupy Freiburg
• 1700 Monarch of Brandenburg becomes king of Prussia

• 1764 Native Americans surrender to British in Indian War of Chief Pontiac
• 1771 West Indian Company & Amsterdam divide up Suriname
• 1776 1st gun salute for an American warship in a foreign port - US Andrew Doria at Fort St Eustatius (Dutch Caribbean isalnd)
• 1776 American Revolutionary War: British and Hessian troops take Fort Washington, New York marking one of biggest losses by US forces
• 1776 British troops capture Fort Washington during American Revolution
• 1798 Kentucky becomes first state to nullify an act of Congress
• 1801 First edition of New York Evening Post
• 1805 Battle at Schongrabern: Russian army stop French
• 1824 New York City's Fifth Avenue opens for business

• 1839 US diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood first reach the ruins of the Maya city of Copan (modern Honduras)
• 1840 New Zealand officially becomes a British colony
• 1841 Life preservers made of cork are patented by Napoleon Guerin (NYC)
• 1849 Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence is later commuted to hard labor
• 1856 Amsterdam post office at Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal opens

• 1863 Battle of Campbell's Station TN, 492 causalities
• 1864 Confederate retreat at Lovejoy, Georgia
• 1870 Spanish Parliament, "the Cortes" formally elects Italian Prince Amedeo Ferdinando Maria as King Amadeo I of Spain
• 1871 National Rifle Association is first chartered in the State of New York
• 1875 Battle of Gundet: Ethiopian emperor Yohannes beats Egyptians
• 1875 William Bonwill, patents dental mallet to impact gold into cavities
• 1882 British gunboat HMS Flirt fires at and destroys villages of Abari and Asaba on the Forcado River in Niger, in retaliation for attack on British owned factory that left 5 Brits missing
• 1894 6,000 Armenians massacred by Turks in Kurdistan
• 1894 French captain Henri Decoeurs troops reach Nikki, West Africa
• 1901 3 autos race on Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, fastest speed achieved by Henry Fournier who drives a mile in 51 4/5 seconds
• 1903 V Herbert & H Smith's musical "Babette" premieres in NYC
• 1905 Dutch Russian Count Witte becomes Prime Minister of Russia
• 1907 Oklahoma becomes the United States 46th state

• 1909 Dutch football club FC Eindhoven is founded in southern part of the city; Eredivisie 1954; KNVB Cup 1937
• 1914 Federal Reserve System formally opens

• 1916 I. Berlin, V. Herbert, H. Blossoms musical premieres in NYC
• 1916 Russian La Satannaya ammunition factory explodes, killing 1,000
• 1917 British occupy Tel Aviv and Jaffa
• 1918 Hungarian People's Republic declared
• 1919 Admiral Miklós Horthy, head of the Hungarian National Army, seizes Budapest and will later become regent of the restored Kingdom of Hungary
• 1920 1st postage stamp meter is set in Stamford Conn
• 1920 Australia's Qantas airways founded in Winton, Queensland as Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited

• 1924 Cleveland Bulldogs lose, 12-7 to Frankford Yellow Jackets at Dunn Field; ends 31-game undefeated streak; NFL and major-league football record
• 1925 American Association for Advancement of Atheism forms (NY)
• 1925 Philip Barry's play "In a Garden" premieres in NYC
• 1926 New York Rangers ice hockey club first game; beat Montreal Maroons, 1-0 at Madison Square Garden, NYC

• 1933 Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky publishes the first evidence for the existence of dark matter in his seminal article "The Redshift of Extragalactic Nebulae" [1]

• 1936 German air force begins bombing of Madrid
• 1937 Several members of the Hesse-Darmstadt royal family die in a plane crash in Belgium while enroute to a family wedding in England; mother and brother of the groom among the dead as aircraft clipped a tall factory chimney
• 1938 K B Regiment refuses round-table conference in East-India

• 1939 German U-boat torpedoes tanker Sliedrecht near Ireland
• 1940 World War II: In response to Germany's leveling of Coventry, England two days before, the Royal Air Force bombs Hamburg.
• 1941 German troops conquer Kertsh (probably)
• 1942 Assault of US B-17 Flying Fortresses on airport at Sidi Ahmed
• 1943 WW II: American bombers strike a hydro-electric power facility and heavy water factory in German-controlled Vemork, Norway
• 1944 US 9th division & 1st Army attacks at Geilenkirchen
• 1945 Founding of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
• 1945 Two new elements discovered by Glenn Seaborg, James, Morgan and Albert Ghiorso were are announced: americium (atomic number 95) and curium (atomic number 96)
• 1945 Yeshiva College (University), chartered in NY, 1st US Jewish College
• 1947 15,000 demonstrate in Brussels against mild sentence of Nazis
• 1950 Egyptian King Faruk demands departure of all British troops
• 1950 UN gets US government approval to issue postage stamps
• 1950 US President Harry Truman proclaims emergency crisis caused by communist threat
• 1952 Papagos' Greek Concentratie wins Greeks parliamentary election
• 1955 Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Yussuph V returns to Morocco
• 1956 Guido Cantelli, Italian conductor, named Musical Director of La Scala, Milan

• 1957 University of Oklahoma Football NCAA win streak ends at 47 after losing 7-0 to Notre Dame at Oklahoma Memorial Stadium
• 1959 "The Sound of Music" musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opens at Lunt Fontanne Theater, NYC; runs for 1443 performances
• 1959 Boston business executive Billy Sullivan is awarded eighth and final franchise of developing American Football League (AFL); later branded Boston Patriots
• 1960 NL batting champion Dick Groat of the Pittsburgh Pirateds wins MVP

• 1961 United Kingdom limits immigration from Commonwealth countries

• 1962 Kuwait adopts constitution (1st, Islamitic)

• 1963 Toledo, OH newspaper strike began
• 1964 Radio CJCX Sydney Nova Scotia (Canada) starts shortwave transmission
• 1964 USSR performs nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan
• 1965 Venera 3 launched, 1st to land on another planet (crashes into Venus)
• 1965 Walt Disney launches Epcot Center: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow
• 1966 "Greatest Hits" album by The Temptations is released (Billboard Album of the Year 1967)
• 1966 Dr Sam Sheppard freed by a jury after 9 years in jail

• 1968 The Derry Citizens Action Committee defies a ban on marches in Derry, Northern Ireland, by marching with an estimated 15,000 people
• 1969 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre of between 347 and 504 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers is first reported
• 1969 US President Nixon becomes first president to attend a season NFL game while in office: the Dallas Cowboys beat the Washington Redskins 41-28
• 1970 South Vietnamese Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky defends operations in Cambodia because communist forces could overrun South Vietnam "within 24 hours" if troops operating there were withdrawn
• 1970 Two men are shot dead by the Irish Republican Army (IRA)
• 1971 The Compton inquiry is published, acknowledging that there was ill-treatment of internees, but rejected claims of systematic brutality or torture (Northern Ireland)
• 1971 The US increase air activity to support the Cambodian government as fighting neared Phnom Penh
• 1972 Elektra Records releases "No Secrets', the third studio album by American singer-songwriter Carly Simon; her commercial breakthrough spends 5 weeks at top of US charts and contains the hit singles "You're So Vain" and "The Right Thing to Do"

• 1973 Skylab 4 launched into Earth orbit

• 1974 1st intentional interstellar radio message sent, Arecibo telescope towards M 41, a cluster of stars some 25,000 light years away

• 1974 John Lennon's single "Whatever Gets You Through the Night", featuring Elton John, goes to #1 in US; the last of the Beatles with a solo chart-topper, it was the only one during his lifetime
• 1974 Milwaukee Bucks lose their 11th straight NBA game (team record)
• 1976 René Levesque's Parti Québécois wins elections in Quebec

• 1978 Major Indoor Soccer League holds its 1st draft

• 1980 Tampa Bay Buccaneer QB Doug Williams throws for 486 yards
• 1981 Dennis Lillee kicks Javed Miandad after he had waved his bat at Dennis

• 1982 5th NASA Space Shuttle Mission Columbia lands at Edwards Air Force Base after 5 days in space, completing its 1st operational flight
• 1982 Agreement reached ending 57 day football strike

• 1984 14th Shuttle Mission (51A) -Discovery 2- lands at Kennedy Space Center (Florida)
• 1984 Houston blocks 20 Denver shots tying NBA regulation game record

• 1984 John Lennon's 'Every Man has a Woman Who Loves Him' released posthumously

• 1987 Paul McCartney releases single "Once Upon a Long Ago"
• 1988 Estonia declares sovereignty in internal affairs

• 1988 President Reagan meets with Jerusalem's mayor Teddy Kollek

• 1989 Six Jesuit priests including Ignacio Ellacuría and two others are assassinated killed by Salvadoran army - one of the most notorious acts of the Salvadoran civil war

• 1989 UNESCO adopts the Seville Statement on Violence at the twenty-fifth session of its General Conference.

• 1995 US Attorney General Janet Reno announces she has Parkinson's disease
• 1997 After nearly 18 years of incarceration, the People's Republic of China releases Wei Jingsheng, a pro-democracy dissident, from jail for medical reasons.

• 1997 Revival of Sherman Edwards' historical musical "1776", featuring Brent Spiner, closes at the Criterion Theater to transfer to the George Gershwin Theatre, NYC

• 2004 "Let Me Love You" single released by Mario (Billboard Song of the Year 2005)

• 2012 'Call of Duty: Black Ops 2' grosses $500 million in 24 hours to become the biggest entertainment launch of all time

• 2014 Klaus Iohannis wins the Romanian Presidential election
• 2014 Novak Đoković claims 3 straight ATP World Tour Finals tennis titles after Roger Federer is forced to withdraw from the final in London through injury

• 2015 Largest diamond discovered in more than a century, a 1,111 carat stone found in the Karowe mine, Botswana
• 2017 19 countries pledge to phase out coal at UN Climate Summit in Bonn, Germany
• 2017 Cambodian court rules to dissolve the country's main opposition party Cambodia National Rescue party (CNRP)
• 2017 US senator Al Franken accused of groping and forcibly kissing a woman

• 2018 Elevator falls down 84 floors when hoist rope breaks, all six people survive unharmed at John Hancock Center, Chicago
• 2018 The kilogram is refined by abstract constants replacing the Le Grand K, along with the ampere (electrical current) and kelvin (temperature) at a conference in Paris
• 2019 500th anniversary of the founding of Havana, Cuba
• 2019 Britain's Prince Andrew refutes claims he had sex with 17 year-old connected to sex offender and friend Jeffery Epstein in BBC interview
• 2019 Samoa declares state of emergency over measles epidemic closing all schools after six deaths
• 2019 Sri Lankan Presidential election, won by former defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa
• 2020 Hurricane Iota makes landfall in Nicaragua as a category four storm, just 15 km south of Hurricane Eta 13 days ago
• 2020 Peru's Congress votes in its third interim President in a week, Francisco Sagasti after violent protests
• 2020 US drugmaker Moderna says its COVID-19 vaccine is 94.5% effective in early data
• 2021 Astronauts on board the International Space Station forced to take shelter as Russian weapons test creates 1,500 debris field

• 2021 Guanyu Zhou confirmed as China's first F1 driver, racing for Alfa Romeo in 2022 [1]
• 2021 Men's roller derby team settles dispute with MLB baseball team, allowing both to use Cleveland Guardians name
• 2022 Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass is the first woman elected mayor of the city of Los Angeles, defeating Rick Caruso [1]
• 2022 NASA's Artemis I mission carrying the uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a test mission around the Moon and back launches from Florida [1]
• 2022 U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives first safety approval on lab-grown meat, chicken grown from animal cells made by Upside Foods [1]

• 2023 Daryl Hall files a lawsuit and a request for a restraining order (later granted) against his music partner John Oates [1]
• 2023 MLB owners unanimously approve Oakland A's proposed move from California to Las Vegas, Nevada; it will become the franchise's 4th home since being established in Philadelphia in 1901

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