The Knowledge Base

On December 1, 1969, the Selective Service System of the United States conducted two lotteries to determine the order of call to military service in the Vietnam War in the year 1970, for men born from January 1, 1944, to December 31, 1950.

These lotteries occurred during a period of conscription in the United States that lasted from 1947 to 1973. It was the first time a lottery system had been used to select men for military service since 1942. The lottery would establish the priority of call based on the birth dates of registrants.

📸 Representative Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) drawing the first number.

The siege of Fredriksten was an attack on the Norwegian fortress of Fredriksten in the city of Fredrikshald (now Halden) by King Charles XII of Sweden.

While inspecting his troops' lines, Charles XII was killed by a projectile. The Swedes broke off the siege, and the Norwegians held the fortress.

Along with the Treaty of Nystad three years later, the death of Charles XII marked the end of the imperial era in Sweden, and the beginning of the Age of Liberty in the country.

🎨 Bringing Home the Body of King Charles XII by Gustaf Cederström (1845-1933)

The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a proposal by the United Nations, which recommended a partition of Mandatory Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the Plan as Resolution 181 (II).

The resolution recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem. The Partition Plan, a four-part document attached to the resolution, provided for the termination of the Mandate, the progressive withdrawal of British armed forces and the delineation of boundaries between the two States and Jerusalem.

The Chicago Times-Herald race was the first automobile race held in the United States. Sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald, the race was held in Chicago in 1895 among six motorized vehicles: four cars and two motorcycles. It was won by Frank Duryea's Motorized Wagon (pictured).

The original course of the race was to run from Chicago north to Milwaukee, but the roads were found to be too poor for early cars to traverse easily. The route was changed to be only 54 miles (87 km) from Chicago to Evanston and back.

The Duryea car finished the race first, completing the race after 7 hours and 53 minutes of running time, 10 hours and 23 minutes total time, having traveled an average of 7 mph (11 km/h). The Benz entered by Oscar B. Mueller crossed the finish line an hour and a half later.

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is an annual parade in New York City presented by the U.S.-based department store chain Macy's. The Parade first took place in 1924, tying it for the second-oldest Thanksgiving parade in the United States with America's Thanksgiving Parade in Detroit (with both parades being four years younger than Philadelphia's Thanksgiving Day Parade).

The three-hour parade is held in Manhattan, ending outside Macy's Herald Square, and takes place from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thanksgiving Day, and has been televised nationally on NBC since 1953.

📸 The parade in the early 1930s.

The Battle of Montgisard was fought between the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Ayyubid Dynasty at Montgisard, in the Levant between Ramla and Yibna.

The 16-year-old Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, severely afflicted by leprosy, led outnumbered Christian forces against Saladin's troops in what became one of the most notable engagements of the Crusades. The Muslim Army was quickly routed and pursued for twelve miles. Saladin fled back to Cairo, reaching the city on 8 December, with only a tenth of his army.

Muslim historians considered Saladin's defeat to be so severe that it was only redeemed by his victory ten years later at the Battle of Cresson, Battle of Hattin and the Siege of Jerusalem in 1187, although Saladin defeated Baldwin IV in the Battle of Marj Ayyun and the Siege of Jacob’s Ford in 1179, only to be defeated by Baldwin IV again at the Battle of Belvoir Castle in 1182 and the Siege of Kerak in 1183.

🎨 The Battle of Montgisard by Charles Philippe Larivière (1798-1876)

The Gąsawa massacre was an attack on the night of 23 / 24 November 1227 during a council of Polish Piast dukes which was being held near the village of Gąsawa in Kuyavia, Poland.

Leszek the White, High Duke of Poland, was caught in his bath but fled on horseback. The attackers caught up with him a few kilometers out of Gąsawa and killed him. Duke Henry the Bearded of Silesia was gravely wounded.

Responsibility for the attack is generally ascribed by historians to Świętopełk of Pomerania. Świętopełk's aim was to make the Duchy of Gdańsk Pomerania, which his House of Sobiesław held as regents of the Polish rulers, independent of Piast overlordship. The murder of Leszek the White, Świętopełk's suzerain, thus served his interests.

However, several historians have pointed to Duke Władysław Odonic, who had forged an alliance with Świętopełk shortly before the attack, as the main instigator. Odonic's actual target would have been his uncle, Duke Władysław Spindleshanks, with whom Odonic had been involved in a long-running conflict over control of Greater Poland. Under this hypothesis, Odonic provided information necessary for a successful attack to Świętopełk's men, who actually did the deed.

🎨 Death of Leszek the White by Matejko (1838-1893)

The Manchester Martyrs were three Irish nationalists – William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O'Brien – who were hanged in 1867 following their conviction of murder after an attack on a police van in Manchester, England, in which a police officer was accidentally shot dead, an incident that was known at the time as the Manchester Outrages.

The three men were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as the Fenians, an organisation dedicated to ending British rule in Ireland, and were among a group of 30 to 40 Fenians who attacked a horse-drawn police van transporting two arrested leaders of the Brotherhood, Thomas J. Kelly and Timothy Deasy, to Belle Vue Gaol. Police Sergeant Charles Brett, travelling inside with the keys, was shot and killed while looking through the keyhole of the van as the attackers attempted to force the door open by shooting the lock.

A crowd estimated at 8,000–10,000 gathered on the evening of 22 November 1867 to witness the public ex*****on of the three convicted men the following morning.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) was assassinated in Dallas at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) on Friday, November 22, 1963.

He was in Texas on a political trip to smooth over frictions in the Democratic Party. Traveling in a presidential motorcade through downtown Dallas, he was shot once in the back, the bullet exiting via his throat, and once in the head.

Kennedy was taken to Parkland Hospital for emergency medical treatment, where he was pronounced dead 30 minutes later, at 1:00 p.m. He was 46 years old and had been in office for 1,036 days.

Lee Harvey Oswald, an order filler at the Texas School Book Depository from which the shots were fired, was arrested for the murder of police officer J. D. Tippit and was subsequently charged with Kennedy's assassination. He denied shooting anyone, claiming he was a patsy, and was shot dead by Jack Ruby on November 24, before he could be prosecuted. Ruby was arrested and convicted for the murder of Oswald. Ruby successfully appealed his conviction and death sentence but became ill and died of cancer on January 3, 1967, while the date for his new trial was being set.

📸 The Kennedys in the presidential limousine moments before the assassination.

The French brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier developed a hot-air balloon in Annonay, Ardèche, France, and demonstrated it publicly on September 19, 1783, making an unmanned flight lasting 10 minutes.

After experimenting with unmanned balloons and flights with animals, the first balloon flight with humans aboard, a tethered flight, performed on or around October 15, 1783, by Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier, who made at least one tethered flight from the yard of the Reveillon workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

After several tethered tests to gain some experience of controlling the balloon, de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes made their first untethered flight in a Montgolfier hot air balloon on 21 November 1783, taking off at around 2 pm from the garden of the Château de la Muette in the Bois de Boulogne, in the presence of the king. Their 25-minute flight travelled slowly about 5½ miles (some 9 km) to the southeast, attaining an altitude of 3,000 feet, before returning to the ground at the Butte-aux-Cailles, then on the outskirts of Paris.

The Battle of Hanoi was fought between France and Đại Nam. A French expeditionary force composed of 140 sailors, 30 marines and 8 officers under the command of Navy Lieutenant Francis Garnier captured the provincial capital Hanoi, where they had been sent by France on a diplomatic mission, without superiors' orders.

The French lost one man by friendly fire, while Vietnamese casualties were relatively heavy, with over 80 dead and 300 wounded, and some 2000 captured.

The capture of the city became the starting point of an unsanctioned military campaign by Lieutenant Garnier and his men, who then proceeded to conquer most of the Bắc Kỳ region over the course of December 1873.

The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, now known as Gettysburg National Cemetery, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated Confederate forces in the Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War's deadliest battle.

It remains one of the best known speeches in American history.

📸 One of only two confirmed photos of Lincoln at Gettysburg taken about noon on November 19, 1863; Lincoln spoke some three hours later.

The Suez Canal is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea.
It was completed and opened on November 17th 1869, after 10 years of construction.

The canal allowed ships to travel between Europe and South Asia without navigating around Africa thereby reducing the sea voyage distance between Europe and India by about 7000 km (4349.6 miles).

The Battle of Fort Washington was fought in New York during the American Revolutionary War between the United States and Great Britain.

It was a British victory that gained the surrender of the remnant of the garrison of Fort Washington near the north end of Manhattan.

A total of 59 Americans were killed in action and 2,837 were taken as prisoners of war. It was one of the worst Patriot defeats of the war.

After this defeat, a large portion of Washington's army was pursued across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania, while the British consolidated their control of New York Harbor and eastern New Jersey.

🎨 A view of the attack against Fort Washington by Thomas Davies (1737-1812)

The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on January 10, 1920, by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War, and held its first assembly in Geneva, Switzerland on November 15 the same year.

The main organization ceased operations on 20 April 1946 when many of its components were relocated into the new United Nations.

As the template for modern global governance, the League profoundly shaped the modern world.

Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (1864-1922), better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 24,898 mile (40,070 kilometer) journey.

Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe, traveling alone for almost the entire journey. Bly's journey was a world record, though it only stood for a few months, until George Francis Train completed the journey in 67 days.

The St. Brice's Day massacre was the mass killing of all Danes (Vikings) in England ordered by King Æthelred the Unready.

After several decades of relative peace, Danish raids on English territory began again in earnest in the 980s, becoming markedly more serious in the early 990s. Following the Battle of Maldon in 991, Æthelred paid tribute to the Danish king.

Æthelred's Kingdom had been ravaged by Danish raids every year from 997 to 1001, and in 1002 Æthelred was told that the Danes in his territory "would faithlessly take his life, and then all his councillors, and possess his kingdom afterwards". In response, he ordered the deaths of all Danes living in England.

The historian Levi Roach states "These purges bred suspicion and division at a critical moment, and in the end [Æthelred's] death was soon followed by the conquest of England by the Danish ruler C**t." King C**t was the son of Sweyn Forkbeard, whose sister Gunhilde was killed in the massacre.

Ellis Island is a federally owned island in New York Harbor, situated within the U.S. states of New Jersey and New York, that was the busiest immigrant inspection and processing station in the United States.

From 1892 to 1954, nearly 12 million immigrants arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey were processed there under federal law.

Today, it is part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument and is accessible to the public only by ferry.

📸 Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1915.

The Cherry Valley massacre was an attack by British and Iroquois forces on a fort and the town of Cherry Valley in central New York during the American Revolutionary War.

A mixed force of Loyalists, British soldiers, Senecas, and Mohawks descended on Cherry Valley, whose defenders, despite warnings, were unprepared for the attack.

During the raid, the Seneca in particular targeted non-combatants, and reports state that 30 such individuals were killed, in addition to a number of armed defenders.

It has been described as one of the most horrific frontier massacres of the war.

The Battle of Varna took place near Varna in eastern Bulgaria. The Ottoman army under Sultan Murad II (who did not actually rule the sultanate at the time) defeated the Crusaders commanded by King Władysław III of Poland and Hungary, John Hunyadi (acting as commander of the combined Christian forces) and Mircea II of Wallachia.

It was the final battle of the unsuccessful Crusade of Varna, a last-ditch effort to prevent further Ottoman expansion into the Balkans.

🎨 The Battle of Varna by Stanisław Chlebowski (1835–1884)

Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the N**i Party's paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hi**er Youth and German civilians throughout N**i Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht (literally 'Crystal Night') comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.

The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.

Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.

The Stockholm Bloodbath was a trial that led to a series of ex*****ons in Stockholm between 7 and 9 November 1520. The event is also known as the Stockholm massacre.

It was a consequence of conflict between Swedish pro-unionists (in favour of the Kalmar Union, then dominated by Denmark) and anti-unionists (supporters of Swedish independence). The anti-unionist party was headed by Sten Sture the Younger, and the pro-unionist party by the Archbishop Gustavus Trolle.

The events occurred after the coronation of Christian II as the new king of Sweden, when guests in the crowning party were invited to a meeting at Tre Kronor castle. Archbishop Gustav Trolle, demanding economic compensation for things such as the demolition of Almarestäket's fortress, questioned whether the former Swedish regent Sten Sture the Younger and his supporters had been guilty of heresy.

Supported by canon law, nearly 100 people were executed in the days following the meeting despite promises of amnesty. Among those killed were many people from the aristocracy who had been supporting the Sture Party in the previous years. Thereafter King Christian II became known in Sweden as Kristian Tyrann ('Christian the Tyrant').

The Battle of Belmont was fought in Mississippi County, Missouri. It was the first combat test in the American Civil War for Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the future Union Army general in chief and eventual U.S. president, who was fighting Major General Leonidas Polk.

The battle was relatively unimportant, and the outcome inconclusive, but with little happening elsewhere at the time, it received considerable attention in the press.

Grant's troops in this battle were the "nucleus" of what would become the Union Army of the Tennessee.

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president and his victory was entirely due to his support in the North and West. No ballots were cast for him in 10 of the 15 Southern slave states, and he won only two of 996 counties in all the Southern states, an omen of the impending Civil War.

Lincoln received 1,866,452 votes, or 39.8% of the total in a four-way race (against John C. Breckinridge, John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas) carrying the free Northern states, as well as California and Oregon. His victory in the Electoral College was decisive: Lincoln had 180 votes to 123 for his opponents.

Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) was an English conspirator, whose face is the origin of the quite famous mask used by hacker group Anonymous.

Fawkes was part of The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby. Their plan was to replace the king with his daughter, third in the line of succession, Princess Elizabeth.
Fawkes was found by guards underneath the Parliament in the early hours of November 5th where he was guarding the explosives the group had planned to blow up Parliament with later that day.

November 5th is by some (mostly in Great Britain) remembered as Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated in memory of the failed attempt on the king.
"Remember, remember the fifth of November..."

🎨 Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot by Henry Perronet Briggs (1793-1844)

The sack of Antwerp, often known as the Spanish Fury at Antwerp, was an episode of the Eighty Years' War. It is the greatest massacre in the history of the Low Countries.

On 4 November 1576, mutinying Spanish tercios of the Army of Flanders began the sack of Antwerp, leading to three days of horror among the population of the city, which was the cultural, economic and financial center of the Low Countries.

At least 7,000 lives and a great deal of property were lost. The deaths were assessed at 17,000 by George Gascoigne, an English writer who was a witness.

The savagery of the sack led the provinces of the Low Countries to unite against the Spanish crown. The devastation also caused Antwerp's decline as the leading city in the region and paved the way for Amsterdam's rise.

The Battle of Vyazma occurred at the beginning of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. In this encounter a Russian force commanded by General Miloradovich inflicted heavy losses on the rear guard of the Grande Armée. Although the French thwarted Miloradovich's goal of encircling and destroying the corps of Marshal Davout, they withdrew in a partial state of disorder due to ongoing Russian harassment and heavy artillery bombardments.

The French reversal at Vyazma was significant due to its damaging impact on several corps of Napoleon's retreating army.

The Battle of Vyazma represented a defeat of the Grande Armée's rearguard, as French losses in this battle, 6,000 to 8,000 casualties, including 4,000 lost as prisoners to the Russians, were prohibitive.

The shock of the Russian attack reduced many French units to a state of disarray, and owing to the speed with which their retreat had to be resumed, order was never restored within them. These disorganized units became easy targets for Cossack raids in the following days.

Russian casualties at Vyazma were no more than 1,800 killed and wounded, out of 26,500 troops involved.

🎨 Battle of Vyazma by Peter von Hess (1792-1871)

The Hughes H-4 Hercules (commonly known as the Spruce Goose) is a prototype strategic airlift flying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, it was not completed in time to be used in the war. The aircraft made only one brief flight, on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced.

The Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and it had the largest wingspan of any aircraft that had ever flown until the twin-fuselaged Scaled Composites Stratolaunch first flew on April 13, 2019.

The abolition of the Ottoman sultanate by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on 1 November 1922 ended the Ottoman Empire, which had lasted from c. 1299.

On 11 November 1922, at the Conference of Lausanne, the sovereignty of the Grand National Assembly exercised by the Government in Angora (now Ankara) over Turkey was recognized.

The last sultan, Mehmed VI, departed the Ottoman capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul), on 17 November 1922.

In March 1924, the Caliphate was abolished, marking the end of Ottoman influence.

📸 Mehmed VI departing from the back door of the Dolmabahçe Palace.

The 95 Theses, or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, is a list of propositions for an academic disputation written in 1517 by Martin Luther, then a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany.

It detailed Luther's opposition to what he saw as the Roman Catholic Church's abuse and corruption by Catholic clergy, who were selling plenary indulgences, which were certificates supposed to reduce the temporal punishment in purgatory for sins committed by the purchasers or their loved ones.

The Theses is retrospectively considered to have launched the Protestant Reformation and the birth of Protestantism, despite various proto-Protestant groups having existed previously.