November Ideas:
http://abcteach.com/MonthtoMonth/November/novemberTOC.htm
http://www.kinderart.com/seasons/nov.shtml

November is National American Indian Heritage Month

Children’s Book Week
http://www.cbcbooks.org/html/book_week.html
http://www.cbcbooks.org/html/celebrate_a-z.html

Thanksgiving
The Pilgrims' wish for a better life and the right to worship as they pleased gave them courage and strength. How the small group sruvived was an inspiration to all settlers who came after them, and to all Americans today. After spending 66 days aboard the Mayflower, the weary passengers were glad to settle on land. During their first winter, some still lived on board the ship. A place to live was one of the challenges the brave Pilgrims faced when the Mayflower anchored off the coast of Massachusetts on Nov. 9, 1620. Even before the Pilgrims set foot on land, they realized they had to agree on how to run their new colony. While the Mayflower lay off the coast, the leaders on board wrote a short agreement. The 41 men on board signed it. The Mayflower Compact was the first time in the history of the United States that a group of citizens had set up their own kind of government. Using the compact as a guide, settlers in the New England colonies set up a kind of government based on town meetings. Citizens gathered at town meetings to discuss and take votes on their town's problems. They set their own taxes and elected leaders. They were able to speak out freely about their government. They learned a lot about how to govern themselves. Winter was coming when the Pilgrims arrived. Building their homes had to start right away. They began to build their first home on Christmas Day, 1620.
The Pilgrims had much for which to be thankful. Ninety native men and 50 Pilgrims attended the feast known today as the first Thanksgiving. The feast was probably held sometime between Sept. 20 and Nov. 9, 1621. Children served their parents and often ate standing up. The house had little furniture. Boards placed over barrels might have served as tables and could be taken down to make more room.
*About Thanksgiving: The Mayflower - The Pilgrims - The Indians: http://rats2u.com/thanksgiving/thanksgiving_pilgrims.htm
*America's Homepage: http://pilgrims.net/plymouth/
*Build a Pilgrim House: 1) Chop down about 30 trees to make your house. 2) Trim off the limbs. 3) Drag the cleaned trunks to the building site. 4) Trim the trunks to make squared beams with ends cut to fit together. 5) Chop pegs out of wood. 6) Make frames out of beams. Raise the four sides up with Y-shaped poles. 7) Drive smaller poles into the ground between the beams. 8) Weave sticks between the poles to make a wall called a "wattle." 9) Fill gaps in the wattle with a mixture of clay and straw called "daub." 10) Split a log into planks with a wedge. 11) Trim and smooth the planks into boards called clapboards. 12) Nail the boards over the daub and wattle to protect them from the weather. 13) Build chimneys of timer, wattle and daub. (Later on, stone was used.) 14) Cut a door and a few windows. Cover windows with paper or cloth rubbed with oil. 15) Wet the ground and smooth it out to make an even floor.
*CanTeach - Thanksgiving: http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/songspoems9.html
*A Celebration Of Thanksgiving: http://www.execpc.com/~shepler/thanksgiving.html
*Cornucopias
Ingredients:
1 ice cream cone (the kind with a pointed end) per student,
Kix cereal
Fill up the cone with Kix cereal.
*Edible Tom Turkey
Ingredients:
1 cookie with chocolate icing in the middle
4 pieces of candy corn (feathers)
1 Whopper (body)
1 red hot (wattle)
a spoonful of chocolate icing ("glue")
Steps in Making an Edible Tom Turkey
1. Twist the cookie apart carefully. Try not to break either half!
2. On one half of the cookie, slather on some icing, and then stick four pieces of candy corn on top of the icing. These will be feathers.
3. On the other half of the cookie, put a bit of icing. This will be used to "glue" the halves together.
4. Gently push the half with the feathers down into the other half of the cookie. The part of the cookie with the feathers should be sitting "up" in the back like a turkey's tail feathers would.
5. Stick the Whopper down on the half of the cookie without the feathers. This will be the head.
6. Put a small amount of icing on the Whopper. "Glue" the red hot on the Whopper. This will be the turkey's wattle.
*Gobbling Contest Sound and Movie: http://cnn.com/US/9711/27/gobble.contest/index.html
*Grand Turkey Hunt: http://www.kraftmstr.com/turkey/index.html
*Grandpa's Tucker Thanksgiving: http://www.night.net/tucker/thanksgiving/index.html-ssi
*Harvest Haystacks (AKA Chow Mein Noodle Candy)
Ingredients:
1 package of butterscotch morsels
1 package of Chow Mein noodles
1 cup of creamy peanut butter
Melt the package of butterscotch in a crockpot.
Add the cup of creamy peanut butter.
Stir in the Chow Mein noodles.
Drop by spoonfuls onto waxed paper and allow the harden.
*Happy Thanksgiving Marvelicious Style: http://www.marvelicious.com/thanksgiving.html
*Holiday Fun - Thanksgiving: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/thanks/index.html
*Holidays around the World for K-12 - Thanksgiving: http://falcon.jmu.edu/%7Eramseyil/holidays.htm#J
*Theholidayspot - Happy Thanksgiving: http://www.theholidayspot.com/thanksgiving/
*Kinderart - Thanksgiving: http://www.kinderart.com/seasons/nov.shtml#thanks
*MayflowerHistory.com: http://www.mayflowerhistory.com/Introduction/introduction.php
*Pilgrim Postage Stamp: http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/images/mayflow.jpg
*The Pilgrims' Voyage: A Map and The Mayflower: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/thanksgiving/map/
*Plimoth Plantation recreates the life and site of the Pilgrims' first village at Plymouth, Mass: http://www.plimoth.org/
*Preschool Arts and Crafts: Holidays - Thanksgiving: http://www.preschooleducation.com/athanksgiving.shtml
http://www.preschooleducation.com/cthanksgiving.shtml
*Rosie's Thanksgiving Dinner: http://www.night.net/thanksgiving/Alpha-Click-Thanks.html-ssi
*Rexanne's Thanksgiving: http://www.rexanne.com/tday.html
*Sammy the Turkey Snake: http://www.night.net/tucker/sammy-thanks/sam-turkey-p1.html-ssi
*Sounds of the Worlds Animals - Turkey: http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/animals/turkey.html
*Thanksgiving:
http://www.nypl.org/branch/kids/thanks.html
http://www7.50megs.com/ggeorge/thanksgiving/thanksgiving1.html
http://www.benjerry.com/fun_stuff/holidays/thanksgiving/index.cfm
http://www.smile-a-day.com/thanksgiving.shtml
*Thanksgiving Activities: http://www.dltk-holidays.com/thanksgiving/index.html
*Thanksgiving Activities for the Elementary Classroom: http://www.gigglepotz.com/thanksgiving.htm
*Thanksgiving Cards:
http://www.freewebcards.com/cards/thanksgiving/index.shtml
http://www.marlo.com/thanksgv.htm
http://www.bluemountain.com/category.pd?path=35270
*Thanksgiving Crafts:
http://www.primarygames.com/holidays/thanksgiving/crafts.htm
http://www.homeschoolzone.com/pp/turkyday.htm
*Thanksgiving Day at Alphabet Soup: http://www.alphabet-soup.net/hol/thanksgiving.html
*Thanksgiving Day Crossword: http://www.sunniebunniezz.com/puzzles/thankcr.htm
*Thanksgiving Games: http://www.night.net/thanksgiving/games11.html-ssi
*Thanksgiving Greeting: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/2328/tkgiving.htm
*Thanksgiving lesson plans: http://www.LessonPlansPage.com/Thanksgiving.htm
*Thanksgiving Match/Memory Game: http://members.tripod.com/emilysholidayhaven/thankmemory.html
*Thanksgiving on the Net: http://www.holidays.net/thanksgiving/index.htm
*Thanksgiving Turkey Tidbits: http://familycrafts.about.com/library/weekly/aa101899.htm
*The Truth About the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving and Where to Get Help Re-creating a
Seventeenth-Century Style Harvest Feast or "The First Thanksgiving": http://pilgrims.net/plymouth/thanksgiving.htm
"Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims seem to go together, just like Christmas and Santa Claus--but the truth is, the Pilgrims never held an autumnal Thanksgiving feast. Before you cancel the turkey, take a look at the origin of that particular myth. In some ways, the truth is even more intriguing."
*Turkey glyph: http://teachers.net/gazette/NOV00/lessons.html
*Virtual Tour of Plymouth Plantation: http://pilgrims.net/plimothplantation/vtour/index.htm
Today Plymouth is the site of a living museum recreating the seventeenth century Pilgrim lifestyle. People in period costumes carry out typical daily tasks. Even their dialect recreates the flavor of the period. The virtual tour is created with photographs and narrative, but there is no continuity in navigation. Use your browser's back button to return to the Virtual Tour index page after each exhibit.

Teacher-Parent Collaboration:
http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-3730.html?egs100802

November is National Epilepsy Month. Take some time this month to talk with someone who has
epilepsy, learn what to do in case someone you are with has a seizure, read a book about omeone with epilepsy or learn about epilepsy prevention. Start now by testing your "Epilepsy IQ" with the following "TRUE or FALSE" quiz:
A. A seizure is a short event that happens when neurons in the brain "fire" out of control.
B. There are many kinds of seizures.
C. One out of 10 people has a seizure sometime during his or her life.
D. Epilepsy means that a person has had more than one seizure and the seizures are not caused by a hormone or chemical imbalance, stress, sleep deprivation, or a high fever.
E. Anyone be diagnosed with epilepsy at any time during his or her life.
F. A head injury, some central nervous system infections (such as meningitis or encephalitis), stroke, or lack of oxygen to the brain can lead to epilepsy.
G. A person can swallow his or her tongue during a seizure.
Answers:
A. True - Epilepsy is caused by an electrical "storm" in the brain. A person having a seizure may lose awareness and may lose control of all or part of his or her body.
B. True - Seizures can range from brief staring spells, to aimless wandering and repeating words, to muscle jerking or a convulsion. Sometimes people may look awake during a seizure, but can't hear or speak or follow directions.
C. True - Hormonal or chemical imbalances, stress, sleep deprivation, and a high fever can all cause a person to have just one seizure. This does NOT mean that the person has epilepsy.
D. True - One out 100 people has epilepsy. That's about 2.5 million Americans!
E. True - However, most of the new cases are in children and seniors.
F. True - But, it is not contagious. You cannot catch epilepsy from someone who has it.
G. False - This is a common myth. You should never put anything in a person's mouth during a seizure. For a handy first aid poster, go to http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/answerplace/recognition/poster.html
Epilepsy prevention includes avoiding brain injuries that can cause epilepsy. Here are some things that you can do to reduce your chances of a head injury and epilepsy:
A. Always wear a properly-fitted, fastened helmet when riding a bike, skateboard, or scooter.
B. Always wear your safety belt in the car or other vehicle.
C. Get adequate exercise and eat a healthy diet to prevent stroke and heart attack.
D. Follow safety rules in the pool and on the playground.
E. Stay away from illegal drugs and alcohol.
For more on epilepsy, see:
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/epi.html

November 1
National Author Day
-1512: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel was opened at the Vatican. It took Michelangelo four years to complete the paintings that decorate the ceiling of the chapel. The paintings are of scenes from the Old Testament, including the famous center section, "The Creation of Adam." The chapel was opened with a Papal Mass celebrating All Souls' Day.
-1604: William Shakespeare's tragedy "Othello" was first presented at Whitehall Palace in London.
-1611: Shakespeare's romantic comedy "The Tempest" was first presented at Whitehall.
-1755: An earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, killed 60,000 people.
-1765: the Stamp Act went into effect, prompting stiff resistance from American colonists.
-1800: President John Adams and his family moved into the newly built White House as Washington, D.C., became the new U.S. capital.
-1861: Gen. George B. McClellan was made General-in-Chief of the Union armies.
-1870: the U.S. Weather Bureau made its first official meteorological observations.
-1871: American journalist, poet and novelist Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was the author of The Red Badge of Courage (1895). His first work was Maggie: Girl of the Streets (1893). It tells the story of a young girl so devastated by her bleak life in the slums that she kills herself. Crane published the book at his own expense under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. In order to afford the printing, he spent his entire fortune and sold the stocks he had inherited from his father. The publication cost 869 dollars, a high price for a run of only 1100 copies. Once it was printed, booksellers refused to sell it because of its harsh images and language. Crane gave away about 100 copies and then burned the rest to warm his house in the winter.
-1880: Sportswriter/poet Grantland Rice and Polish author Sholem Asch were born.
-1918: The Hapsburg monarchy of Austria-Hungary was dissolved. Vienna became the capital of Austria and Budapest the capital of Hungary.
-1920: Journalist James Kilpatrick was born.
-1922: Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey became a republic.
-1929: Actress Betsy Palmer was born.
-1935: Golfer Gary Player was born.
-1942: Publisher Larry Flynt was born in Magoffin County, Kentucky. He's the head of Larry Flynt Publications, which produces over twenty sex magazines, including Hustler. He's also been involved in several high-profile legal battles concerning the first amendment. Flynt said, "Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper."
-1944: "Harvey," a comedy by Mary Chase about a man and his invisible friend, a 6-foot-tall rabbit, opened on Broadway. Lee Smith was born in Grundy, Virginia. She wrote Fancy Strut (1973), Black Mountain Breakdown (1981), The Devil's Dream (1992), and The Last Girls (2002). As a child, she spent time in her father's store, watching customers through a peephole in the ceiling. She would study their interactions and voices, and later use them in her stories. She said, "I discovered a down-home narrative voice that would allow me to write about these people without writing down to them."
-1950: Two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to force their way into Blair House in Washington in an attempt to assassinate President Truman. One of the pair was killed.
-1952: the U.S. tested its first hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands.
-1954: The western African nation of Algeria began its rebellion against French rule.
-1957: Country singer, songwriter and actor Lyle Lovett was born in Klein, Texas, which was founded by his great-great grandfather. He grew up on his family's horse ranch. He's known for mixing traditional country music with folk, big-band swing, and pop music. He got degrees at Texas A & M in German and journalism, and then went off to Germany to study. The entire time, he was also playing music at cafes and small festivals. In 1986, he released his self-titled debut album, and he's had a string of successful albums ever since.
-1958: Actress Rachel Ticotin ("Total Recall," "Natural Born Killers") was born.
-1964: In the Vietnam War, the U.S. air base at Bien Hoa is shelled by Communist guerilla mortar fire. Four Americans are killed and 72 are wounded, along with
two Vietnamese fatalities and five wounded. The attack destroys 5 US B-57 bombers and damages 15 others. Four American helicopters, and three Vietnamese A1H Skyraider bombers are also destroyed. This is worst military set-back sustained by the United States forces to date in this war.  Bien Hoa . . . The Battle of Bien Hoa.
-1972: Jenny McCartney was born.
-1973: following the "Saturday Night Massacre," acting Attorney General Robert H. Bork appointed Leon Jaworski as the new Watergate special prosecutor, succeeding Archibald Cox.
-1979: former first lady Mamie Eisenhower died in Washington D.C. at age 82.
-1986: A warehouse fire in Basel, Switzerland, triggered massive chemical pollution of the Rhine River in Switzerland, France, West Germany and the Netherlands.
-1989: East Germany reopened its border with Czechoslovakia, prompting tens of thousands of refugees to flee to the West. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega carried out his
threat to suspend a government cease-fire with the Contra rebels.
1990: Iraq announced it would permit hostages' families to visit during the Christmas season, but the offer was condemned by the West as cynical. McDonald's, under pressure from environmental groups, said it would replace plastic food containers with paper.
1991: The Russian Congress of People's Deputies granted Boris Yeltsin sweeping powers to launch and direct radical economic reforms in Russia.
1993: The Columbia completed a 14-day flight, the longest mission in U.S. space-shuttle history. The European Community's treaty on European unity took effect.
-1994: The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report saying CIA Director R. James Woolsey's response to the Aldrich Ames spy case was "seriously inadequate," but that his predecessors were ultimately to blame for the scandal.
-1996: Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole accused President Clinton of taking foreign money in his bid for re-election. Michigan euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian was
released on bond, promising not to assist in any more suicides.
-1998: the military arm of the radical Islamic group Hamas made an unprecedented threat against Yasser Arafat, demanding the Palestinian leader halt a crackdown against it, or face violent vengeance. John Kagwe of Kenya won the New York City Marathon for the second consecutive year; Franca Fiacconi became the first Italian to win the women's division.

November 2
-1734: Frontiersman Daniel Boone was born.
-1755: Marie Antoinette was born in Vienna, Austria. At age 15 she was married to the crowned prince of France, who became King Louis XVI four years later. He was quiet and kept a low profile, but she was outgoing and flamboyant, and people came to resent her extravagant ways. She tended to do her own thing with her friends, and thereby alienated a lot of the people in the court. They distributed satirical pamphlets criticizing her as immoral and wasteful. Antoinette supported the Old Regime when the French Revolution began, and when the National Convention established the First French Republic in 1792, she and the King were imprisoned. On October 16, 1793, she was executed on the guillotine. Marie Antoinette became the symbol of the
extravagance of the court. Her reign marked the decline of the prestige of the French monarchy and largely contributed to the outbreak of the French Revolution.
-1795: President James Polk was born.
-1865: Warren G. Harding, was born. He died August 2, 1923. Harding was elected 29th US President in 1920. His presidential campaign was based on the themes of a "Return to Normalcy" (after WWI) and a nationalist "America First" policy. He died suddenly in office in an atmosphere of sexual and financial scandal in 1923. He was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge."
-1885: Astronomer Harlow Shapley, a pioneer in studies of the Milky Way, was born.
-1889: North and South Dakota became the 39th and 40th states of the Union.
-1890: Swedish writer Moa Martinson was born in Vardnas, Sweden. She was a novelist and journalist who wrote about the struggles of poor farm workers in the Swedish countryside. She left home when she was thirteen years old, and worked at a series of menial jobs. She married a cement worker when she was twenty, and they had five sons together. But two of the children drowned, and in 1928 her husband killed himself. She eventually got remarried to the novelist Harry Martinson, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974. She became a journalist and a socialist, and she wrote passionately on behalf of farm and factory workers. In 1933, she came out with her first novel, Women and Appletrees, about several women's struggle against poverty and abuse. She's best known for her autobiographical trilogy published in the late 1930s: Mother Gets Married (1936), Church Wedding (1938), and The King's Roses (1938).
-1913: Actor Burt Lancaster was born.
-1917: British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour proposed a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Israel became a reality 31years later.
-1918: Ray Walston was born.
-1920: The first scheduled radio broadcast in the United States was by station KDKA in Pittsburgh. It broadcasted the results of the presidential election in which Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox. The broadcaster read telegraph ticker results over the air as they came in, and the few people in the eastern part of the country who owned radios could tune in to listen. The 1920 election was also the first election in which women were allowed to vote, following the passage of the nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
-1934: Australian tennis player Ken Rosewall was born.
-1938: Columnist-turned-presidential candidate Pat Buchanan was born.
-1942: Author Shere Hite and actress Stephanie Powers, were born.
-1947: Howard Hughes piloted the 200-ton flying boat Spruce Goose on its only flight, at Long Beach, Calif.
-1953: Actress Alfre Woodard was born.
-1961: Singer k.d. lang was born.
-1962: President Kennedy announced the Soviet missile bases in Cuba were being dismantled.
-1983: President Reagan signed the bill establishing a national holiday to mark the birthday anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.
-1986: American hostage David Jacobsen was released in Beirut after 17 months. Later disclosures showed hisfreedom was a trade for U.S. arms sent to Iran.
-1992: Legendary filmmaker Hal Roach died at age 100. He was credited with discovering the legendary comedy team of Laurel and Hardy and went on to produce the "Our Gang" comedies. HIV-infected Earvin "Magic" Johnson retired from professional basketball "for good."
-1993: Two Republicans -- Christine Todd Whitman and George Allen -- were elected governors of New Jersey and Virginia, respectively. In New York City, Republican mayoral candidate Rudolph Giuliani defeated Democratic Mayor David Dinkins. A new series of wildfires swept along the Southern California coast, destroying more than 300 homes in the exclusive community of Malibu.
-1995: The Justice Department indicted the Japanese-owned Daiwa Bank on conspiracy and fraud charges linked to an illegal bond-trading scheme.
-1996: Britain announced a plan to ban ownership of large-caliber handguns.
-1997: French truck drivers began a weeklong strike, blockading major roads and ports.

November 2
-1718: John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich was born. He died in 1792. A British politician, h is remembered as the inventor of the sandwich

November 3
-1794: Poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant was born in Cummington, Massachusetts. He's known for his poems "To a Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis." He published several poems before he turned 21, and wrote his famous poem "Thanatopsis" when he was only eighteen. He worked on it through several revisions before it was published anonymously in the North American Review in 1817. The poem is about living life to the fullest so that when death comes there are no regrets.
-1903: Photographer Walker Evans was born in St. Louis. He worked mostly in black and white, and didn't use any fancy equipment or techniques. He took pictures with an old beat-up camera with a slow lens and developed his pictures with rudimentary materials. He tried to capture images of the failed American promise—portraits of sharecroppers, old automobiles, faded signs, ghost towns of the West, decrepit factories. He compiled these pictures in his book American Photographs in 1938.
-1942: Detective writer Martin Cruz Smith was born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pennsylvania. His mother was a jazz singer, and his father was also a jazz musician. He began by writing potboilers and reporting for newspapers before he wrote Gorky Park, which he sold in 1981 for a million dollars. It's a detective novel set in Moscow, and in 1983 it was made into a movie starring William Hurt. Smith wrote two more Russian mystery novels with the same detective character, and then he wrote Rose (1996), set in a nineteenth century English mining town. His most recent book is December 6 (2002), about Tokyo just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Smith said, "You have to be an outsider to write."

November 4
-1841: Benjamin Franklin "B.F." Goodrich was born. An army surgeon and manufacturer, he began the manufacture of rubber products in New York in 1869, and moved the company to Akron, OH in 1870. The company became B.F. Goodrich Company in 1880.
-1879: Rodeo performer and humorist Will Rogers was born in Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Rogers was performing in a Wild West show in New York City one day, when one of the cows got free. He captured it with a rope, and the story made the next day's papers, and caught the attention of some people in show business. He landed roles in vaudeville and then on Broadway, with Hammerstein and Ziegfeld.
-1916: Walter Cronkite was born. A television journalist, he was born in St. Joseph, MO and was the CBS EveningNews anchorman (1962-1981). In addition to winning a Golden Globe in 1960, Cronkite is the received numerous Emmys for his work in broadcast journalism. In 1973, an opinion poll voted Cronkite "the most trusted man in America."
-1922: Carol Moseley Braun is the 1st Africn American woman to be elected to the US Senate. Tomb of Tutankhamen was discovered.
-1936: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C(harles) K(enneth) Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his collection Repair. He also wrote Lies (1969) and Flesh and Blood (1987), among other collections. He didn't particularly like literature when he was growing up and hated English class in school. His father encouraged him to memorize poetry, but he never thought of writing it himself until he was nineteen and wrote his girlfriend a love poem. After that experience, he knew that writing poetry was something he had to do, even if he wasn't good.
-1971: Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, singer, songwriter, producer, was born. In 1993 he started his own production company, Bad Boy Entertainment. Worked with such artists as Mariah Carey, New Edition, Method Man, Babyface, TLC, Boyz II Men, Li’l Kim, SWV, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, and the late rapper Notorious B.I.G.

November 5
-1863: James W. Packard, engineer, inventor, manufacturer, was born in Warren, Ohio. After college, he worked for the Sawyer-Mann Electric Company, manufacturers of incandescent electric lamps, and acquired several patents. After the company was sold to Westinghouse
(1889), he founded the Packard Electric Company in Warren, Ohio, with his brother, William who designed and built an automobile in 1899 and started the Packard Motor Car Company.
-1885: Writer and historian Will Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts. He's best known for a huge, eleven-volume work called The Story of Civilization (1939-1975). In the book, which he wrote with his wife Ariel, he attempts to synthesize nearly all of human history, following artistic, scientific, religious, and political movements. It was an effort to create a world history for the ordinary person. Though the book was heavily criticized for being incomplete, it was important to many people who wanted to read and enjoy history.
-1900: Natalie Schafer, actress who played Mrs. Howell on Gilligan's Island, was born. When she died of cancer in 1991, she left everything to her cat.
-1911: Roy Rogers, actor, singer, was born Leonard Franklin Slye in Cincinnati, Ohio. When he was eighteen he moved with his mother and father to California, where he earned money by harvesting fruit and working as a cowhand. He started playing guitar and singing in small theaters and on the radio in the 1930s. He met Bob Nolan and Tim Spenser, and they started the band "Sons of the Pioneers." The band made appearances in several motion pictures. Rogers's first screen name was "Dick Weston." He changed it to Roy Rogers just before he got his first big break, replacing Gene Autry in the movie Under Western Stars (1938). The movie was a hit, and it launched Rogers's steady film career as a singing cowboy. Rogers, with his trademark horse Trigger, appeared in nearly 100 films during the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, many of them featuring his second wife Dale Evans. He died of congestive heart failure.
-1923: Professor and novelist Thomas Flanagan was born in Greenwich, Connecticut. Flanagan was a high school friend of Truman Capote and worked with him on the school newspaper. He became a professor of English literature at Columbia, and then at Berkeley. His specialty was Irish literature, and he began a tradition of spending every summer in Ireland. On these trips he formed friendships with many Irish writers.One day Flanagan was waiting for his wife to pick him up from his office and found himself staring at a blank piece of paper on his desk. He was suddenly struck by an image of a man walking down a road, and decided to write a novel. The image became the opening chapter of his first book, The Year of the French (1979), about the failed 1798 Irish uprising against British. He went on to write two more historical novels, The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994).
-1937: Novelist and biographer Geoffrey Wolff weas born in Los Angeles, California (1937). He's written biographies of the poet Harry Crosby, the writer John O'Hara, and his own father.
-1940: Irish-American writer Tom Phelan was born in County Laois, Ireland. He was a priest, a carpenter, and a professor before he emigrated to the United States and became a writer. His best-known novel, In the Season of the Daisies (1996), is about the murder of a small boy by a member of the Irish Republican Army, after the boy witnessed a political murder. Phelan has written two other books, Iscariot (1995) and Darrycloney (1999).
-1943: Actor and playwright Sam Shepard was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. His father was an alcoholic who worked in the Air Force, and the family moved often during Shepard's childhood. The Shepards finally settled in California, where they lived on an avocado ranch. Shepard moved away from California to become an actor, and eventually settled in New York. He wrote a few short plays and supported himself as a bus boy. He lived with the son of jazz legend Charles Mingus. The younger Mingus said that when Shepard wasn't reading Samuel Beckett or working, he would go into his room with a ream of paper, close the door, and emerge some time later with the same box of paper, holding a new play. Shepard's early plays were innovative, influenced by early experiments as a rock musician. In 1979, he wrote Buried Child, which deals with the deterioration of the traditional American family. It won the Pulitzer Prize. One of his most recent plays, The Late Henry Moss (2000), is about conflict between two brothers and their dead father.

November 6
-1861: James Naismith, physical education teacher, and the inventor of basketball, was born in Ontario, Canada. While at the YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) in Massachusetts, Luther Gulick, head of the school's physical education department, asked him to devise a form of indoor team sport for the winter, one that would not involve expensive equipment. Naismith devised a game of throwing balls through hoops - half-bushel peach baskets at first, thus providing the name "basketball." The game spread quickly, growing into an international sport.
-1869: First modern American football game was played between Rutgers and Princeton.
-1892: The man who founded The New Yorker magazine, Harold Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado. His father worked in the mining business, and the family had to move from Colorado to Utah when the silver beds ran dry. Ross said he got interested in the newspaper business when he found out that journalists got to go on police patrols and ride fire engines. He ran away from home when he was sixteen and began riding the rails around the country, working at various newspapers from New Orleans to California. He was known for his love of the nightlife in San Francisco, and he once gave the former king of Thailand a tour of seedy nightclubs. In the 1920s, Ross worked in the New York City publishing industry and became friends with many of the important artists of the time. People like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edna St.Vincent Millay came to his parties, and Irving Berlin would entertain the guests on Ross's piano.
-1921: Novelist James Jones was born in Robinson, Illinois. At the urging of his father, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1939. He was stationed in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He went on to fight in the battle of Guadalcanal, where he was wounded, earning the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. He kept a journal while he was in the army, and when he got home from the war, he wrote a novel about the experience of disillusioned veterans. It was rejected by all the major publishing houses, but the editor Maxwell Perkins liked a particular scene from the novel and told him to expand it. He spent five years expanding that scene, and it became the novel From Here to Eternity (1951), the story of a soldier's life in the years leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The novel was a huge international bestseller, in part because Jones tried to portray military life as realistically as possible, using dirty language in the dialogue and describing soldiers' reckless sex lives. Jones used much of the money he made from the book to start a writing colony, and he bought a mobile home to travel around the country. He went on to write many more novels, including The Thin Red Line (1962) about the Battle of Guadalcanal.
-1946: Sally Field, actress, producer, director, was born in Pasadena, California. Field is well known for her dramatic career growth, from a teenaged actress who performed in lightweight TV
sitcoms to a mature Academy Award-winning performer, as well as a director and producer. Won Best Actress Oscars for "Norma Rae" and "Places In The Heart".
-1970: Actor and novelist Ethan Hawke was born in Austin, Texas. He's best known for acting in such movies as Dead Poets Society (1989) and Training Day (2001), but he has also published two novels. He says he likes writing because it doesn't require collaboration. His first novel, The Hottest State (1996), got mixed reviews, but most critics praised his second, Ash Wednesday (2002). It's about an army staff sergeant who goes AWOL to take a road trip with his pregnant girlfriend Christy.

November 7
-1867: Marie Curie, the most famous woman of physics, was born. She has been recognized for her work with Nobel Prize awards in both physics (1903) and chemistry (1911). While examining pitchblende, a uranium ore, she discovered radium and polonium. In 1910 she succeeded in isolating pure radium metal.
-1879: Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was born in the Ukraine. He was one of the leaders of the ruthless civil war that overthrew the Russian Tsar and established the communist state. Later, he opposed the dictator Josef Stalin and became an enemy of the Soviet government. Apart from his political activities, Trotsky read and wrote a great deal. In his later years, he wrote many books about Russian history and Marxist ideas. In 1924 he wrote Literature and Revolution, a book that talks about art's relationship to politics. Trotsky said, "Learning carries within itself certain dangers, because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies."
-1897: Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz was born in New York City. For a while he worked as a critic for The New Yorker, and then in 1926 he moved to Hollywood to write for the movies. He wrote to a friend, "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." He worked on the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941), which some believe to be the greatest film ever made.
-1913: Writer Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria. He spent his life writing novels and essays, and he was friends with the French existentialist philosophers. His father died in World War I when he was still a baby, and he grew up in poverty. When he was a teenager, he came down with tuberculosis. He recovered, but the disease kept returning for the rest of his life. As a young man he tried to become a philosophy teacher, but they turned him down because of his illness. Instead, he worked as a journalist, but what he really wanted to do was write novels. He said, "The only thing is to decide which is the most aesthetic form of suicide: marriage and a 40-hour-a-week job, or a revolver." He began to write, but he wasn't sure if his books would ever be any good. In 1940, he moved to an Algerian town called Oran, where he spent time on the beach. One day, he saw a friend of his get into a fight with some Arab men and threaten them with a pistol. Soon afterward, he worked the scene into a novel called The Stranger, which became his most famous book. The book begins, "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." The narrator kills someone and goes to prison, where he eventually reconciles himself to his situation.
-1943: Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was born in Ft. MacLeod, Alberta. At the age of nine she went to the hospital with polio. To cheer herself up, she began singing to other patients. She learned to play guitar by reading a book by the folk legend Pete Seeger. As a young woman, she moved to Toronto and began to play at coffeehouses. She quickly became famous in folk circles, and drifted between Detroit, New York and California. In 1969, she was invited to play at Woodstock, but she was scheduled to appear on a talk show soon after the event, so she didn't go. To make up for it, a year later she wrote the famous song "Woodstock." She's best known for her album Blue, which came out in 1971.
-1917: A Bolshevik minority revolts, marking the beginning of the Russian Revolution.

November 8
-1519: Montezuma receives Hernando Cortes in Aztec Capital.
-1731: A group of young men in Philadelphia pooled their money to set up the first library in America. The idea for a library came about when Benjamin Franklin started a club with about 50 friends so they could debate about politics, morality and the natural sciences. The group was called the Club of Mutual Improvement. When they disagreed about a topic, they liked to consult books. But books were expensive in those days, so they combined their resources to found a subscription library. They called it the Philadelphia Library Company. The rule was that any "civil gentleman" could browse through the volumes, but only subscribers were allowed to borrow them. The library expanded over the years. Later it moved to Carpenter's Hall, the building where the First Continental Congress met in 1774. Franklin said that after the library opened, "reading became fashionable, and our people, having no public amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books."
-1897: The woman who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York. She started out as a journalist, and later she became an activist. She said, "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily."
-1900: Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta. Growing up, she always tried to be at the center of attention. She said, "If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it; or, well, I'd be a prize fighter — anything for the thrills." She had many suitors when she was young. She fell in love with a man who went to fight in World War I, and he never returned. Then in 1922, she married a man named Berrien Upshaw. He was a cruel and violent husband, and the marriage ended after two years. Around the same time, she began writing feature stories for an Atlanta newspaper. She got the job when she lied to the editor, saying she was a "speed demon" on a typewriter. She traveled all over the city, writing about rodeos, beauty contests, summer camps, hospitals and prison cells. She also wrote for a gossip column called "Elizabeth Bennett." Mitchell remarried a few years later, and in 1926 she developed a terrible pain in her ankle. She couldn't walk, so she had to quit her job and stay in her apartment. She passed the time reading books. After it seemed like she'd read everything in the library, she decided to try to write a book herself. She wrote Gone With the Wind, starting with the last chapter. The book tells the story of Scarlett O'Hara, a woman born on a plantation who loses everything after the Civil War. At the end of the book, Scarlett pleads with the man she loves, Rhett Butler, who says he is going to leave her. She tells him she doesn't know what she'll do if he goes away. But he replies, "My dear, I don't give a damn."
-1920: Esther Rolle, best remembered for her role as the strong-willed mother on the '70s sitcom Good Times, was born. She fought to overcome negative black stereotypes throughout her career, but ironically often played a maid. She won an Emmy playing a maid in Summer of My German Soldier. Her film credits include Driving Miss Daisy, Rosewood and How to Make an American Quilt.
-1960: Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon for the presidency.

November 9
-1818: Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev was born in Orel, Russia, best known for his novel Fathers and Sons (1862). He was one of the three great nineteenth century Russian novelists, along with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, who wrote about the changing society of nineteenth century Russia. He grew up near Moscow, where his mother was a wealthy landowner, but as a young man he went away to study in Berlin. The experience of leaving Russia changed his life. He said, "I threw myself head first into the 'German Sea,' in which I was . . . cleansed and reborn, and when I finally surfaced from its waves, I was a 'Westernist' and remained one forever." From a distance, he began to think of Russia as a barbarous place where serfs were kept as slaves and treated as animals. He would devote the rest of his life to exposing the inhumanity of serfdom.
-1923: American poet James Schuyler was born in Chicago. He was associated with the New York School of poetry that included poets like John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. He's known for writing funny, conversational poems about everyday life. He had been writing poetry for twenty years before his first major collections of poems, Freely Espousing (1969), was published. That same year, he wrote a novel called A Nest of Ninnies with his friend John Ashbery. It's about two families in suburban New York whose lives are so boring that the book has almost no plot. Schuyler won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his collection The Morning of the Poem.
-1928: Poet Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother's literary ambitions were destroyed by her turbulent family life. Anne got married when she was nineteen, spent a few years as a model, and had a daughter when she was 25. She suffered from postpartum depression, had a mental breakdown, and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. In 1955, she gave birth to another daughter, had another breakdown, and was once again hospitalized. This time, she saw an analyst who told her she should write about what she was feeling and thinking and dreaming. She began writing poetry, often two or three sonnets a day, and many of the poems dealing with her psychiatric struggles were collected in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960). She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for Live or Die, before committing suicide in 1974.
-1951: Lou Ferrigno was born. He was only 21 when he won his first Mr. Universe title, a
Guinness Book record that stands to this day. More incredible, at age 22 he won again - and to this day remains the only person to win consecutive titles. Played the title character in the hit show "The Incredible Hulk".
-1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 1945, after World War II, Germany was divided by the victors into two countries. East Germany was controlled by the communist regime of the Soviet Union. West Germany was a democracy supported by the U.S. The former capital city of Berlin, although it was entirely within East German borders, was also partitioned in two. In 1961, the East Germans erected a 103-mile barrier to separate East Berlin from West Berlin. The Berlin Wall blocked free access in both directions for twenty-eight years. In November 1989, the Wall was opened, and East German citizens could once again travel without restriction to the West.
Chris De Witt's Berlin Wall Site: http://www.appropriatesoftware.com/BerlinWall/welcome.html
"A few steps. From one world to the other. We are in pre-1990 Berlin, Friedrichstrasse, Checkpoint Charlie. Our world has Coca-Cola, Mercedes cars, holidays abroad, and changing governments. A few meters up the street, we enter their world of state-owned factories, grey apartment blocks, an imposed monolithic government and a command economy selling pale imitations of popular western products." Chris De Witt writes about his fascination with the Berlin Wall and his travels there during the eighties.
Hope, Anguish and the Berlin Wall: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/artcollection/exhibitions/august/
Last year Daimler-Benz AG of Germany gave Microsoft a twelve-foot high, four-foot wide, three-and-a-half-ton section of the Berlin Wall. The piece is covered with colorful graffiti, painted as an expression of protest against the Stalinist East German regime. Wall art, however, was always temporary. Because even the west side of The Wall stood on East German land, the authorities would periodically order it whitewashed, thereby creating a fresh canvas for new artistic endeavors. This terrific online exhibit explores the Wall from a historical, sociological, artistic, and personal perspective.
Kennedy and Reagan at the Berlin Wall: http://www.nara.gov/exhall/originals/kennedy.html
On June 26, 1963, in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech that paid tribute to the Berliners' quest for freedom. The crowd roared with approval upon hearing the President's dramatic words, "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am a Berliner). Twenty- four years later, President Ronald Reagan made an appearance at the Berlin Wall and challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" to demonstrate his commitment to profound change.
Ode to Joy and Freedom: The Fall of the Berlin Wall: http://www.ursulashistoryweb.f2s.com/wall.html "Novice historian" Ursula Grosser Dixon tells her personal account of the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany. "This monstrous barrier, which had caused so much grief and pain for so many, has become nothing but a sad memory. But the most amazing wonder of it all: It happened without violence, it happened because people wanted to live in peace and freedom."

November 10
-1483: Theologian Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Saxony, which is now located in Germany. He's best known as the man who sparked the Protestant Reformation, but he was also an extraordinarily productive writer. Between the years of 1516 to 1546, he published an article on religion every other week, totaling more than sixty thousand pages. He wrote theology, hymns, poetry, liturgies, sermons, preaching aids, commentaries, translations, and polemics. It has been estimated that during his writing life, his published writings made up twenty percent of all the literature being published in Germany at the time.
-1730: Oliver Goldsmith was born in Pallas, County Longford, Ireland. He only wrote for fifteen years, but he produced everything from essays to poetry to fiction and plays. He's best remembered for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his long poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his play She Stoops to Conquer (1773).
-1879: Poet Vachel Lindsey was born in Springfield, Illinois. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, but he dropped out of medical school after three years and tried to make a living drawing pictures and writing poetry. After struggling for several years, and working for a time in the toy department of Marshall Fields, he decided to walk across the United States, trading his poems and pictures for food and shelter along the way. It wasn't nearly as exciting as he thought it would be. He said, "No one cared for my pictures, no one cared for my verse, and I turned beggar in sheer desperation . . . [but] I was entirely prepared to die for my work, if necessary, by the side of the road, and was almost at the point of it at times." In 1913 Poetry magazine published Lindsay's poem "General William Booth Enters into Heaven," and it was a big hit. He went on to write many collections of poetry for adults and children, including The Tree of the Laughing Bells (1905) and Every Soul Is a Circus (1929).
-1893: American novelist John Phillips Marquand was born in Wilmington, Delaware. His father was a wealthy stockbroker, but the panic of 1907 bankrupted him. Marquand was sent to live with his aunts, and he was the first member of his family to go to public instead of private school. He got into Harvard on a scholarship, but he was always ashamed of his family's financial troubles, and it made him very aware of the struggle for social status among the upper class. He went on to write about that struggle in several novels of manners, including The Late George Apley (1937), Wickford Point (1939), and Point of No Return (1949). He was an enormously successful writer while he was alive, earning more than ten million dollars from his writing during the 1950s. Though he had been hailed for his examination of social class in his lifetime, and had won a Pulitzer Prize, he became unfashionable after his death. Critics were suspicious of a writer who not only wrote about rich people, but was himself a rich person. They also didn't appreciate his emphasis on realism rather than literary innovation. His books are now all out of print.
-1919: The first airmail service was established between Paris and London.
-1960: Writer Neil Gaiman was born in Portchester, England. He writes serious comic books and turns them into graphic novels. As a young man, he supported himself as a freelance journalist, and even wrote a best-selling book about the rock band Duran Duran, but what he really wanted to do was to write a comic book for adults. He once said, "The most important dreams, the most manipulable of cultural icons, are those that we received when we were too young to judge or analyze." He wanted to take those icons of his youth and write about them in a serious, literary way. In 1987, DC Comics let him pick one of their old, failed comic book characters and revive him. Gaiman chose a character called The Sandman, who uses sleeping gas to catch criminals. Gaiman kept the name but changed everything else, turning the character into the god of both dreams and stories. He chose different artists to draw the seventy-five issues, and he filled the series with references to myths, folklore and literature, especially Shakespeare. In 1991, a single issue of The Sandman called "A Midsummer Night's Dream" became the first comic book to win the World Fantasy Award for best short story. Gaiman has also written non-graphic novels for adults, including Neverwhere (1996) and American Gods (2001). His most recent book is Coraline (2002), about a little girl who is taken captive by a doll that looks just like her mother, except that she has buttons for eyes.
-1969: Sesame Street made its television debut.

November 11
Veteran's Day
A large time line of the major wars and events can be made in the cafeteria or other large area. Each student contributes one name and places it on the time line. Students talk to relatives, cousins, grandparents and parents to obtain this information. They design creative way to display their name. Once the information is collected, place it on the large time line
Lesson plans for Veteran's Day: http://www.LessonPlansPage.com/VeteransDay.htm
Sections include Origin of Veterans Day, History of Taps, and Facts About the American Flag ("The stars have one point up.")
Last Living Veterans of America's Wars
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/veteransday3.html
When a witness to a significant historical event dies, we lose an important original source. And the only history we have left is what was written or otherwise recorded. These tables with numbers and dates remind us to take advantage of the living links to our past while we still can. Many people have compared the September 11th attacks to Pearl Harbor. There are more than six and half million World War II veterans still alive.
Department of Veteran Affairs: Veterans Day: http://www.appc1.va.gov/vetsday/
This government site has a poster gallery that is accessed by clicking on the twenty-four years of Veterans Day posters. This year's poster can be downloaded in various sizes and printed or used as desktop wallpaper. There is a sixteen-page Teachers Guide (in Acrobat PDF); the Patriotic Fact Sheet (look for Activities for Veterans Day); and the Veterans Day FAQ ("What is the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day?")
Stars and Stripes Forever: Veterans Day Quiz:
http://www.familyeducation.com/quiz/0,1399,3-3830,00.html
"Everyone knows it's Veterans Day. But what do you know about this holiday and the American veterans it celebrates? Take the quiz and find out." Five self-scoring questions (with the an explanation of each answer) cover the history and customs of the Veterans Day. Upon completion, you can jump to any of dozens of quizzes, some designed for students (check out Thanksgiving History Quiz and Winter Solstice Tradition Quiz), others for parents and teachers.
-1821: Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born.
-1831: Nat Turner, who led fellow slaves on a bloody uprising in Virginia, was hanged. Turner, an educated minister, believed he was chosen by God to lead his people out of slavery. Some 60 whites were killed in the two-day rampage.
-1885: Gen. George Patton was born.
-1889: Washington was admitted to the Union as the 42nd state.
-1899: Actor Pat O'Brien was born.
-1904: Alger Hiss, who was accused of being a communist spy in Washington in the late 1940s, was born.
-1918: World War I ended with the signing of the Armistice.
-1921: President Harding dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.
-1922: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., novelist, was born. He studied at Cornell, and served in the US Air Force in World War II. Afterwards he studied anthropology at Chicago University, and worked as a reporter and public relationswriter. His novels are satirical fantasies, usually cast in the form
of science fiction. He is best known for Slaughterhouse Five (1969), based on his experiences as a prisoner-of-war at the destruction of Dresden in 1945.
-1925: Comedian Jonathan Winters was born.
-1927: Jazz musician Mose Allison was born.
-1938: Kate Smith first performed "God Bless America" on her regular radio broadcast. The song had been written for her by Irving Berlin.
-1951: Golfer Frank Urban "Fuzzy" Zoeller was born.
-1962: Actor Demi Moore was born.
-1964: Philip McKeon and Calista Flockhart were born.
-1974: Leonardo DiCaprio was born.
-1982: The space shuttle Columbia blasted off on the first commercial space mission.
-1987: President Reagan nominated Judge Anthony Kennedy to the U.S. Supreme Court after Judge Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his nomination and Judge Robert Bork was rejected by the Senate.
-1989: An estimated 1 million East Germans poured into West Germany for a day of celebration, visiting and shopping. Most returned home.
-1990: Stormie Jones, the Texas girl who underwent the world's first heart-liver transplant, died in Pittsburgh of a possible heart infection.
-1992: The twin girls whose 53-year-old mother was believed to be the oldest woman to bear twins by in-vitro fertilization were introduced to the public in Anaheim, Calif. The Church of England broke the tradition of a male-only clergy when it voted to allow the ordination
of women as priests.
-1994: Jimi Hendrix's stage outfit, John Lennon's "army" shirt, and guitars from the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and the Beach Boys were among the items sold at the first-ever pop memorabilia and guitar sale at Christie's in New York.
-1996: A massive snowstorm hit the snow belt east of Cleveland, Ohio.
-1997: Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Roger Clemens became the first American League player and only the third major league player to win the Cy Young Award four times.
-2001: On the two-month anniversary of the terrorist attacks, President Bush and leaders from around the world stood in the shadow of the World Trade Center ruins and, in a colorful and solemn ceremony, honored the dead from more than 80 nations.

November 12
-1889: Founder of Reader's Digest, DeWitt Wallace was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was seriously wounded in World War I. During his recovery he read hundreds of magazines, and he began to realize that a pocket-sized magazine full of condensed general interest articles from other magazines could be a big hit. He compiled a sample issue of the first Reader's Digest and spent years trying to sell the idea to publishers in New York, but they all turned him down. He would have given up, but he was fired from his job and figured he didn't have anything to lose. He moved to New York to publish the magazine on his own, and when he arrived he ran into a woman he had known years before named Lila Bell Acheson. He told her about his idea and she decided to help him get it off the ground. They marketed the magazine themselves from a basement underneath a Greenwich Village speakeasy, and while working on the magazine they fell in love and got married. Just before they left on their honeymoon, they sent out several hundred circulars advertising subscriptions, and when they got back, they had 1,500 subscribers. The first issue came out in February, 1922. People didn't think it would last, because it was just a reprint journal, but Wallace had a talent for finding those stories that appealed to the widest number of people. By the end of the decade, Reader's Digest was one of the most profitable magazines in the country, and it is now one of the most widely read magazines in the world.
-1915: Philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg, France. His father was killed in World War I, and his mother struggled to support the family, working as a bookbinder. Barthes did well in school and wanted to be a professor of literature and philosophy, but he came down with tuberculosis as a young man. Because of his frequent relapses, and the periods of time he had to spend in sanitariums, he couldn't hold down a teaching job. So instead of writing long books about great works of literature, he began to support himself by writing short essays about popular culture. He was one of the first literary critics to apply sophisticated literary theory to things like movies, stripteases, toys, and wrestling matches. He said, "I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and . . . it's been pretty fun." He greatly expanded the scope of cultural studies, and it is partially thanks to him that college students can now take classes on subjects like Bugs Bunny. His essays are collected in books such as Mythologies (1957) and Empire of Signs (1970). Barthes said, "Literature is the question minus the answer."
-1943: Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn was born in New York City. He's best known as a character actor in Hollywood movies such as The Princess Bride (1987), and Clueless (1995), but he's also one of the most experimental modern playwrights in America. His father was William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1952 to 1987. Wallace grew up surrounded by the New York literary society, and he became an excessively sophisticated kid. In grade school he wrote puppet plays about the fall of Chinese dynasties, and he wrote a puppet adaptation of Paradise Lost that went on for hours. But when he grew up, most people found his plays too strange. He said of his first play, Four Meals in May (1967), "[I thought it was] the answer to the war in Vietnam. I thought they would rename the country after me when people saw that play! . . . [But they acted] as if they'd been given a handful of blank pieces of paper."
-1945: Journalist and short story writer Tracy Kidder was born in New York City. He served in the Vietnam War and came back to write the short story "The Death of Major Great" (1974), about a group of soldiers who kill their commanding officer. The story was published in the Atlantic Monthly and launched his career as a writer. But instead of continuing to write stories, he decided that the best use of his talent would be to describe the real world in non-fiction. After a book about a murder trial that he considered a failure, he focused his attention on the growing industry of computers. He spent eight months living in the basement of Data General Corporation, watching the engineers at work on a new microcomputer, which they said would revolutionize the world. He wasn't sure he believed them, but he wrote about the engineers anyway, describing the way they talked, what they looked like, their rituals, frustrations and desires. He described the engineers as, "knights errant, clad in blue jeans and open collars, seeking with awesome intensity the grail of technological achievement." He said, "They believe that what they do is elegant and important, but they have the feeling that no one else understands or cares." His book The Soul of a New Machine was published in 1981. It was one of the first non-technical books about the computer industry, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. Kidder went on to write many more books, including House (1985), about the world of carpenters and house building, and Among Schoolchildren (1989), about the education industry. His most recent book is Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003).
-1961: Nadia Comeneci, gymnast, was born. She was the star of the 1976 Olympic Games, when at the age of 14 (coached by Bela Karolyi) she won two individual gold medals for her performance on the uneven parallel bars and the balance beam and became the first gymnast ever to obtain a perfect score of 10.

November 13
-354: Saint Augustine was born in Tagaste, Numidia, a part of North Africa that is now Algeria. His father was a wealthy Roman landowner, living on the outer edge of the Roman Empire, and his mother was a local tribeswoman. Augustine grew up thinking of his father as a tyrant and his mother as a saint. He lived at a time when the Roman Empire was beginning to decline, and there were new religions cropping up everywhere. His mother was a Christian, but he went away to college in Carthage and got involved in a new religion called Manichaeism, which taught that the universe was controlled by two equal but opposing forces, one good and one evil. When he came home from college, and his mother found out about his new religion, she was so disgusted that she threw him out of the house. He went to live with a rich friend and started living the high life, trying to get over his mother's rejection. He made a name for himself as an orator, and he spent most of his free time out on the town, spending his friend's money on expensive goods and on women. Then, without warning, his rich friend fell sick and died. Augustine was shocked to learn that his friend had received the Christian sacrament on his deathbed. He thought his friend was a Manichaean like him. The incident plunged Augustine into a deep depression. He wrote, "Darkness fell upon my heart, and wherever I looked there was only death." Augustine wanted to live the rest of his life in quiet meditation, but when he visited the city of Hippo, near his hometown, the parishioners there forced him to become a priest and replace their aging bishop. He accepted the post out of fear for his safety, but he regretted for the rest of his life that he had been forced to take time away from reading and writing to perform the duties of a bishop, stranded in such a provincial town. At the time, Christians were spread so far and wide across the Roman Empire that there was a lot of diversity in their beliefs. Augustine became a famous theologian in part because he spoke out against this diversity, arguing that all Christian churches should follow the doctrine of the central church in Rome. It is partially due to his writings that the Catholic Church did not break up into separate churches for another thousand years. Augustine especially attacked the group of Christians known as Donatists, who believed that the only true Christians were those people who lived their lives completely free of sin. Augustine argued that no one could possibly be free from sin, because sinfulness is the very nature of humans. He developed the idea of original sin, saying that all humans are born sinful because all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, who committed the first sins.
-1850: Robert Louis Stevenson, writer, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His romantic adventure story Treasure Island (1883) brought him fame, and entered him on a course of romantic fiction which included Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1896), considered his masterpiece. He began to suffer from a lung disease at a very early age. He said, "My recollections of the long nights when I was kept awake by coughing are only relieved by thoughts of the tenderness of my nurse." His nurse stayed up with him at night when he couldn't sleep and told him all kinds of stories about ghosts and monsters and pirates. His father was an engineer who specialized in building lighthouses, and Stevenson studied engineering himself until he dropped out of school and became a bohemian, hanging out with seamen, chimneysweeps and thieves. He wanted to live a life of adventure, to sail the high seas, but his poor health forced him to move to France, where the weather was supposed to be better. One night, he was passing by the window of a house when he looked inside and fell instantly in love with a woman he saw eating dinner with a group of friends. He stared at her for what seemed like hours, and then opened the window and leapt inside. The guests were shocked, but Stevenson just bowed and introduced himself. The woman was an American named Fanny Osborne, and when she traveled back to the United States, he followed her all the way to San Francisco, and finally married her there.
-1971: Mariner 9 was the first successful spacecraft to orbit another planet.  While orbiting Mars, it mapped its entire surface.

November 14
Mix It Up at Lunch Day: Nov. 14
Since 2002, millions of students in thousands of schools have swapped seats in their school cafeterias and gotten to know new people on Mix It Up at Lunch Day.
* Find out what it's like:
http://www.tolerance.org/teens/what.jsp?ttnewsletter=ttnewsgen-08162006
* Order a free info pack:
http://www.tolerance.org/teens/order.jsp?ttnewsletter=ttnewsgen-08162006
* Download free activity booklets: http://www.tolerance.org/teach/mix_it_up/classroom.jsp?ttnewsletter=ttnewsgen-08162006
Student Essays
Use these youth essays to deepen student understanding of the damage done by exclusion, ostracism and intolerance. Discussion and writing prompts are included.
* The 'Geeky' New Girl: http://www.tolerance.org/teens/stories/article.jsp?ar=172&ttnewsletter=ttnewsgen-08162006
* 'I Don't Talk to People Like You': http://www.tolerance.org/teens/stories/article.jsp?ar=90&ttnewsletter=ttnewsgen-08162006
Free Resources
Use these free Teaching Tolerance materials to expand your lessons of community building:
* "One World Poster Set," featuring 10 full-color posters and an activity guide for all grades: http://www.tolerance.org/teach/resources/posters.jsp?ttnewsletter=ttnewsgen-08162006
* "I Will Be Your Friend," a song-and-activity book for early grades: http://www.tolerance.org/teach/resources/your_friend.jsp?ttnewsletter=ttnewsgen-08162006

-1666: The first blood transfusion took place in London. Blood from one dog was transfused into another.
-1765: Robert Fulton, Engineer, inventor, artist; was born in Lancaster County, Pa. He completed the steamboat Clermont, which made its first trial run on the Hudson River in August 1807. Although not really the inventor of the steamboat, his was the first to make it commercially successful in America. He later developed the New Orleans, the first steamboat on the Mississippi River, and constructed a steam-powered warship to defend New York Harbor during the War of 1812.
-1832: The first horse-drawn streetcar made its appearance in New York City.
-1840: French Impressionist painter Claude Monet was born.
-1851: Harper & Brothers published Moby-Dick , by Herman Melville, about a ship captain named Ahab who is obsessed with hunting the great white sperm whale that took his leg. The book had been published in Britain in October with the title The Whale; Melville's decision to change the title didn't get there in time. The American version of the book had crowded pages and ugly binding, but the English version was done in three beautiful volumes with bright blue and white covers. It also had gold stamps of whales, but they were the wrong kind: they were shaped like Greenland whales—humpbacks or gray whales—instead of sperm whales. The British publisher accidentally left out the ending of the book, the epilogue. This confused a lot of British readers, because without the epilogue there was no explanation of how the narrator lived to tell the tale. It seemed like he died in the end with everyone else on the ship. The reviews from Britain were harsh, and costly to Melville. At the time, Americans deferred to British critical opinion, and a lot of American newspaper editors reprinted reviews from Britain without actually reading the American version with the proper ending. Melville had just bought a farm in Massachusetts, his debts were piling up, he was hiding them from his wife, and he was counting on Moby-Dick to bring in enough money to pay off his creditors. The book flopped, partly because of those British reviews. Melville never fully recovered from the disappointment.
-1889: Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru was born.
-1896: Mamie Doud Eisenhower, wife of President Eisenhower, was born.
-1900: American composer Aaron Copland was born.
-1904: Actor Dick Powell was born.
-1907:
*Swedish author Astrid Lindgren was born Astrid Ericsson on a farm near Vimmerby, Sweden. One day in 1944, Lindgren sprained her ankle, and while she was stuck in bed she wrote down the Pippi Longstocking stories she'd been telling her children for years. She wanted to give a copy to her daughter Karin for her tenth birthday. Astrid Lindgren was so happy with her work that she sent it to a publisher, and in 1945, Pippi Longstocking was published. Pippi is a nine-year-old girl with no parents who lives in a red house at the edge of a Swedish village with her horse and her pet monkey, Mr. Nilsson. She has red pigtails, and she wears one black stocking and one brown, with black shoes twice as long as her feet. She eats whole chocolate cakes and sleeps with her feet on the pillow, and she's the strongest girl in the world. The sequels to Pippi Longstocking include Pippi Goes on Board (1946) and Pippi in the South Seas (1948). Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking books are her most popular, but she wrote more than 115 others, including detective stories, adventure stories, fantasy novels, and realistic fiction. Her books have sold 80 million copies and have been translated into Arabic, Armenian, Vietnamese, and Zulu. Lindgren died last year in Stockholm. She was 94. When she was asked what she wanted for her 94th birthday, she said, "Peace on earth and nice clothes."
*Cartoonist and author William Steig was born in New York City. When he was 23, The New Yorker bought one of his cartoons for $40. It was 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression, and his father had lost his job. William said he wanted "to be a professional athlete, or to go to sea like Melville," but he earned $4,500 his first year as a cartoonist, which he used to support the family. His cartoons are collected in books such as Small Fry (1944), Spinky Sulks (1988), and Our Miserable Life (1990). In 1990 he wrote Shrek!, about a green ogre whose name means "fear" in Yiddish and who has nightmares about fields of flowers and happy children who won't stop hugging and kissing him. Steig's last book, When Everybody Wore a Hat, is a picture-book memoir about what it was like to be eight years old in 1916.
-1908: Sen. Joseph McCarthy, D-Wis., was born.
-1910: Poet Norman Alexander MacCaig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He worked as a primary school teacher for more than 30 years, and he became one of Scotland's most esteemed poets. His books include Riding Lights (1955) and Tree of Strings (1977).
-1921: Actor Brian Keith was born.
-1922: Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was born.
-1929: Actor McLean Stevenson was born.
-1930: Astronaut Edward White, killed in the 1967 Apollo I launchpad fire, was born.
-1935: King Hussein of Jordan wa born.
-1940: German planes bombed Coventry, England, destroying or damaging 69,000 buildings.
-1948: Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, was born.
-1954: New Age singer/songwriter Yanni was born.
-1962: Actress Laura San Giacomo ("Just Shoot Me") was born.
-1972: For the first time in its 76-year history, the Dow Jones Industrial Stock Average closed above 1,000.
-1984: Former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon went to court in New York with a $50 million libel suit against Time (Magazine) Inc. He lost after a two-month trial.
-1986: The White House acknowledged the CIA role in secretly shipping weapons to Iran.
-1988: The PLO proclaimed an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, endorsing a renunciation of terrorism and an implicit recognition of Israel.
-1989: The Navy ordered a 48-hour "stand-down" for a safety review following 10 unrelated accidents resulting in 10 deaths during a three-week period.
-1990: A gunman in Dunedin, New Zealand, killed 11 neighbors, then was killed by police in the nation's worst mass slaying. A 12th victim died later.
- 1991: U.S. and British officials accused two Libyan agents in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in which 270 people died. A former postal worker in Royal Oak, Mich., returned to work and killed four people before turning the gun on himself.
-1993: In a referendum, residents of Puerto Rico voted in favor of continuing their U.S. commonwealth status.
-1994: The 31-mile Chunnel Tunnel under the English Channel opened to passenger traffic.
-1997: Sara Lister, an assistant secretary of the Army, resigned after apologizing for having spoken of the U.S. Marine Corps as "extremists."

November 15
-1708: British statesman William Pitt ("the elder") was born.
-1738: British astronomer Sir William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, was born.
-1763: The surveying of the Mason-Dixon Line was completed after four years of work. It was named for the surveyors who did the job, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. The line was commonly seen as the dividing line between the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. But originally, the surveying was commissioned to settle a border dispute between families who owned land in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
-1777: The Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation for the American colonies.
-1840: Claude Monet was born.
-1864: Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman began his Civil War march from Atlanta to the sea.
-1874: Nobel Prize-winning physiologist August Krogh of Denmark was born.
-1882: Jurist Felix Frankfurter was born.
-1887: Georgia O'Keefe, painter, who died March 6, 1986 at age 98, was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She became famous for flower paintings such as "Black Iris." Due to her wild
disregard for traditional notions of color and perspective, O’Keeffe is widely regarded today as one of the primary shapers of modern art in the U.S.
-1891: Diplomat W. Averell Harriman and World War II German Gen. Erwin Rommel, were born.
-1906: Gen. Curtis LeMay was born.
-1919: TV personality and retired Judge Joseph Wapner was born.
-1920: The first assembly of the League of Nations was called to order in Geneva, Switzerland.
-1929: Actor Edward Asner was born.
-1932: Pop singer Petula Clark was born.
-1934: American poet Ted Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He served in the Korean War as a sentry, went to college at the University of Tulsa, and then went to live on the Lower East Side of New York City, where he met up with poets Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Dick Gallup. To get by, Berrigan wrote papers for students at Columbia; bummed money from friends; and stole, read, and resold books he couldn't afford to buy. He would walk as fast as he could from one movie theater or art gallery or museum to another, and liked to stay up all night long drinking coffee and talking with friends. He and his friends would quote from the work of their favorite poets—John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, Dante. In 1962, Berrigan married Sandy Alper after a courtship of only a few days, and they had a son the next year.
-1937: Actor Yaphet Kotto was born.
-1940: Actor Sam Waterston was born.
-1942: Conductor Daniel Barenboim was born.
-1943: Heinrich Himmler ordered Gypsies and part-Gypsies to be placed in Nazi concentration camps.
-1954: Actress Beverly D'Angelo was born.
-1957: "Tonight Show" band leader Kevin Eubanks was born.
-1969: 250,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the Vietnam War.
-1987: 27 people were killed when a Continental Airlines DC-9 jet crashed in a snowstorm during takeoff from Denver.
-1989: Tornadoes struck six Southern states, killing 17 people, injuring 463 and causing at least $100 million in damage in Huntsville, Ala., alone.
-1990: The "Keating Five"--Sens. Alan Cranston, D-Calif.; Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.; John Glenn, D-Ohio; John McCain, R-Ariz.; and Donald Riegle, D-Mich.--maintained their inno-
cence at the opening of Senate hearings into charges of influence peddling on behalf of S&L kingpin Charles Keating.
-1991: The Justice Department revealed criminal indictments of BCCI and three businessmen associated with it.
-1992: Newsweek quoted Elizabeth Tamposi saying a State Department colleague acting on behest of the White House asked her to dig up information on then-Democratic presiden-
tial nominee Bill Clinton.
-1997: HBO's "Oz" was named best dramatic series at the 19th CableAce Awards in Los Angeles.

November 16
-42 BC: Tiberius (Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus), who died 37AD, Roman emperor (14--37), the son of Livia, and stepson and successor of the Emperor Augustus was born.. Despite the soundness of his administration and foreign policy, politically his reign was a disaster. The suspicious death of his heir Germanicus was followed by the excesses of his chief henchman, Sejanus, and the reign of terror that followed Sejanus's downfall made him an object of universal loathing. Few mourned when he died on Capri, the island retreat that had been his home since 26.
-1873: Blues composer W.C. Handy was born in Florence, Alabama. His father and grandfather were Methodist ministers, and he grew up in a cabin on the Tennessee River. He showed musical promise very early. As a child, he could identify the notes and intervals of birdsongs and ferry whistles he heard from the river. His family expected him to become a minister. When his father discovered he'd bought a guitar, he took it from Handy, and exchanged it for a dictionary. Handy left home and went on the road with a number of bands before ending up in Memphis, Tennessee, where he set up his headquarters on Beale Street. He studied popular music and became the first person to write down the music that would become known as "the blues." His first song, "Memphis Blues," was written for E.H. Crump, who was running for Mayor of Memphis. Later, he wrote his most famous song, "St. Louis Blues." Handy was not the first person to play the blues, but he was the first person to write sheet music for it and make it accessible for mass consumption. For this he was called "The Father of the Blues." He compiled blues music and published a book called Blues: An Anthology in 1926. He also wrote Negro Authors And Composers of the United States (1935).
-1889: Playwright George S. Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He collaborated on more than 40 plays, with such writers as Marc Connelly (Merton of the Movies, 1922), Ring Lardner (June Moon, 1929), Edna Ferber (Dinner at Eight, 1932), and Morrie Ryskind (Of Thee I Sing, 1931).
-1892: The University of Chicago, a founding member of the Big 10, won its first football game, beating Illinois, 10-4.
-1904: Jazz guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon was born.
-1907: Oklahoma became the 46th state admitted to the Union.
-1909: Actors Burgess Meredith was born.
-1930: Writer Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria. He grew up in a mostly traditional village in Nigeria, though his parents were evangelical Protestants. He was encouraged to learn about the native Ibo culture by visiting local festivals and religious ceremonies. He began to read English books about Nigerian culture and people, and saw that to many people in Europe he was just "one of those savages, dancing around in the twilight of the jungles." After going to college and working for a while with the BBC, Achebe began to write. His first and most famous book was Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. It's about traditional Ibo village life and how it changes after the arrival of European colonizers. The book is written in English, but weaves in traditional idioms and proverbs. Achebe said "proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten." Things Fall Apart is one of the most important works of a nationalist revival in Nigeria. It has become an international success, selling eight million copies in the first 41 years it was published.
-1933: The United States established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
-1958: Marg Helgenberger was born.
-1959: The Sound of Music premiered in New York.
-1967: Lisa Bonet was born.
-1977: Olympic figure skater Oksana Baiul was born.
-1982: National Football League players ended a 57-day strike.
-1984: The space shuttle Discovery returned to Earth with the first two satellites ever plucked from space.
-1989: Six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter were shot to death at their residence inSan Salvador. Seven children were killed when a tornado struck an elementary school near Newburgh, N.Y.
-1990: The Soviet Union indicated its approval of the use of military force to oust Iraq from Kuwait.
-1991: House Democrats reported that Salvadoran Defense Minister Gen. Rene Ponce had planned the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. Former Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards of Louisiana was overwhelming elected, defeating former Ku KluxKlan member David Duke.
-1992: A federal judge in Los Angeles refused to reconsider the Navy's appeal of an injunction that forced the service to reinstate sailor Keith Meinhold, the first openly homosexual person on active duty in the U.S. military. Prosecutors in Detroit filed second-degree murder charges against two police officers who allegedly beat black motorist Malice Green to death. Two other officers
were charged with lesser offenses.
-1993: The United Nations Security Council voted to end the manhunt for Somali warlord Gen. Mohammed Farah Aideed.
-1997: 85 percent of citizens of Hungary voted in favor of joining NATO.

November 17
-1558: Queen Elizabeth I acceded to the English throne upon the death of her sister, Queen Mary. She reigned for 45 years, one of the greatest eras in English history. Near the end of her reign, she said to her subjects: "Though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves."
-1800: The U.S. Congress met for the first time in Washington, D.C.
-1869: The Suez Canal was formally opened to traffic. The sea-level waterway is 100 miles long, connecting, by way of three natural lakes, the Mediterranean Sea with the Gulf of Suez and the Indian Ocean.
-1906: Japanese industrialist Soichiro Honda was born in Iwata-Gun, Japan. He ran several small manufacturing operations before and during World War II. After the war, he had great success manufacturing a small gasoline engine that could be attached to a bicycle to transform it into a motorcycle. He began the Honda Motor Company, producing first motorcycles and then small sports cars.
-1916: American novelist and historian Shelby Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi. He was a successful novelist when, in 1952, he accepted the suggestion of his publisher to write a short history of the Civil War to complement his novel Shiloh (1952). The result, The Civil War: A Narrative, was an exhaustive 3,000-page, three-volume history, published a volume at a time in 1958, 1963, and 1974.

November 18
-1787: Abolitionist and orator, Sojourner Truth, was born.
-1810: Botanist Asa Gray was born in Oneida Country, New York. His most famous work, Gray's Manual of Botany, remains a standard work on the subject.
-1836: Playwright and humorist Sir W[illiam] S[chwenk] Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan was born in London. It was 1870 when he met composer Arthur Sullivan. They started working together the following year and produced a series of hits including H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzanze (1879), Patience (1881), The Gondoliers (1889), and others.
-1861: Advice columnist Dorothy Dix was born in Montgomery County, Tennessee. She wrote for the New York Journal, where she reached sixty million readers, advising them to "live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us."
-1874: Clarence Day was born in New York City. He wrote several collections of humorous essays, but didn't gain popularity until he authored a satirical portrait of his own Victorian family household in Life with Father (1935).
-1909: Lyricist Johnny Mercer was born in Savannah, Georgia. His first song, "Out of Breath and Scared to Death of You," was featured in the revue Garrick Gaieties in 1930. In 1942, he founded Capitol Records with two partners. In 1946, with Mercer serving as president, the company sold 42 million records, one-sixth of the total records sold in the United States. Capitol was also the first record company to provide disk jockeys with free promotional records.
-1928: Mickey Mouse's Birthday
Hidden Mickeys of Disney: http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/
A Hidden Mickey is a Mickey Mouse image concealed in the design of a Disney attraction. Started as an inside joke among Walt Disney Imagineers, the Mickey silhouette (circular head with two circular ears) was "hidden" in plain sight. Soon, word spread and fans everywhere were searching for Hidden Mickeys in Disney movies and theme parks. The definition of a Hidden Mickey includes any Mickey Mouse image, be it a silhouette or a full-featured Mickey. This site catalogues hundreds of Hidden Mickeys, and they welcome your new sightings or your confirmation of existing entries.
-1939: Novelist and poet Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario. She spent most of her childhood living in a research station in the cold north of Quebec with her father, who was an entomologist. There were no theaters and the radio did not work well, so Atwood decided to be a writer. She thought that in order to become an author of any importance she would have to become mysterious and aloof, sickly and enigmatic--that she would have to live in a garret, dress in black, smoke cigarettes, drink absinthe, and have lovers whom, she said, "I would discard in appropriate ways, though I drew the line at bloodshed. (I was, after all, a nice Canadian girl.)" She's best known for her novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985).
-1976: Spain's parliament approved a bill to establish a democracy after 37 years of dictatorship.

November 19
-1863: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln for Primary Children: http://www.siec.k12.in.us/~west/proj/lincoln/index.html
Every year Mrs. Payton's first grade class (from Loogootee, Indiana) visits Abraham Lincoln's Boyhood National Memorial. Join them for a virtual tour of Abe's childhood log cabin by visiting the Picture Gallery. Afterwards you'll be ready for the Quiz ("Where was Abe Lincoln born?") and Online Treasure Hunt ("What is the name of the church Abraham Lincoln attended in Springfield, Illinois?") Looking for Lincoln lesson plans for your class? Try the Classroom Activities.
Abraham Lincoln Online: http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln.html
David Davis, an Illinois judge and close friend of the Lincoln family, said this about Honest Abe: "From the humblest poverty, without education, or the means of attaining it; unaided by wealth or influential family connections, he rose, solely, by the strength of his intellect and the force of his character, to the highest position in the world." This five-star site is a compendium of Lincoln letters, speeches, virtual tours, news items, art gallery and links to hundreds of Lincoln resources.
Ford's Theater National Historic Site: http://www.nps.gov/foth/index2.htm
"On the night of April 14, 1865 John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln who had been attending a play at Ford's Theater. The President was carried to a small bedroom in the back of the Petersen House, a boarding house across the street from the theater, where he died in the early morning hours." In addition to the story of Lincoln's assassination, this National Park Service site is filled with unexpected treasures, such as a word search, a photo gallery and a ranger presentation.
Gettysburg Address: http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/gadd/ga.html
In 1863, David Wills, a Pennsylvania judge, was given the task of "cleaning up the horrible aftermath of the [Civil War] battle" at Gettysburg. Wills acquired seventeen acres for a national cemetery and three weeks before its dedication, invited President Lincoln to "formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks." Lincoln's brief remarks at the cemetery on November 19, 1863 became one of the most memorable presidential speeches ever given. Can you recite it? "Four score and seven years ago . . ."
History Place Presents Lincoln: http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/
This single page illustrated time line of Lincoln's life begins in 1637 when Lincoln's ancestors arrived from England to settle in Hingham, Massachusetts. Easy to read, it is peppered with personal tidbits such as "1817 - In February, Abraham, age seven, shoots a wild turkey but suffers great remorse and never hunts game again," and "1841 - January 1, breaks off engagement with Mary Todd. Has episode of depression."
-1905: Trombonist and bandleader Thomas Francis "Tommy" Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. He was known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing." His father was a miner and self-taught musician who led a band in his spare time. He was determined that Tommy and his older brother Jimmy would not follow him into the mines, and began giving them lessons on the cornet as soon as they could blow a horn. Both boys were soon playing in their father's band. By the time Tommy was sixteen, the brothers had a band of their own, Dorsey's Wild Canaries. They played with Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Venuti, and Paul Whiteman's orchestra. At the urging of Glenn Miller, the Dorseys formed an eleven-piece orchestra for which Miller wrote most of the arrangements.
-1899: Poet and novelist (John Orley) Allen Tate was born in Winchester, Kentucky. During his time at Vanderbilt, Tate was the only undergraduate to be allowed membership in the Fugitives, an informal group of Southern intellectuals that included poet Robert Penn Warren. The Fugitives met once a week to discuss poetry--their own and others'--and to mount a defense against the notion that the South did not possess a significant literature of its own. The Fugitives were practitioners and defenders of formalism in poetry, and were preoccupied with defending the traditional values of the agrarian South against the effects of urban industrialization. Tate is best known for his poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1926).
-1942: Poet Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, California. Olds was, in her own words, raised as a "hellfire Calvinist" in Berkeley, California. She graduated from Stanford and then moved east to attend graduate school. After she got her Ph.D. she stood on the steps of the library at Columbia University and vowed to become a poet, even if her poetry turned out to be bad. Her first collection, Satan Says, was published in 1980 when she was 37 years old. More than five books later, she has become one of America's most highly regarded poets. Her readings attract overflow audiences, and her volume The Dead and the Living won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her more recent works include The Wellspring (1992), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), and The Unswept Room (2002).

November 20
-1272: Edward I was proclaimed King of England.
-1780: Britain declared war on Holland.
-1789: New Jersey became the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights.
-1851: Botanist John Merle Coulter was born.
-1884: Norman Thomas, six times the Socialist Party candidate for U.S. president, was born.
-1900: "Dick Tracy" cartoonist Chester Gould was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma. He tried drawing all sorts of comic strips for the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate before he offered a strip called "Plainclothes Tracy" in 1931. It became the comic strip "Dick Tracy," and it was the first comic strip to depict racketeers and bloodshed and murder. Dick Tracy was a detective who was in love with Tess Truehart. All of the villains were grotesque figures with physical abnormalities and names like Flattop, Pruneface, The Mole, and The Brow.
-1908: TV commentator Alistair Cooke, was born in Manchester, England. He started out as commentator on American affairs for the BBC in England, and later became host of Masterpiece Theatre on PBS; but he was also a writer.
-1916: Singer/actress Judy Canova was born.
-1920: Actress Gene Tierney was born.
-1923: Novelist and short story writer Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She's the author of sixteen collections of stories and thirteen novels, most of which deal with the issue of race in her homeland. Gordimer is the daughter of Jewish immigrants from London and Latvia. Her father was a wealthy jeweler, and the contrast between her own privileged background and the conditions of the black mine workers stirred her political conscience at an early age.
-1925: Senator Robert F. Kennedy was born.
-1926: Actresse Kaye Ballard was born.
-1927: Estelle Parsons was born.
-1932: Actor/TV game show host Richard Dawson was born.
-1939: Comedian Dick Smothers was born.
-1943: Actor Veronica Hamel was born. The Battle of Tarawa-Makin, marking the beginning
of the U.S. World War II offensive against Japan in the Central Pacific, began.
-1945: 24 German leaders went on trial at Nuremberg before the International War Crimes Tribunal.
-1947: Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth II of England, married Philip Mountbatten.
-1948: Richard Masur was born.
-1956: Bo Derek was born.
-1959: Sean Young was born.
-1967: Ming-Na Wen (“ER”) was born.
-1975: Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. He lost to incumbent Gerald Ford, who was defeated by Democrat Jimmy Carter. Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain died.
-1982: President Reagan announced U.S. Marines would go to Lebanon to assist in the evacuation of PLO fighters.
-1986: Former national security adviser Robert McFarlane called the secret arms deal he arranged in Iran a "mistake" that failed to gauge public disapproval. The World Health Organization announced a coordinated global effort against the disease AIDS.
-1990: British Prime Minister Thatcher failed to win a 65-percent majority in a Conservative Party vote, forcing a runoff against Michael Heseltine.
-1991: The United States provided $1.5 billion in food and technical assistance to the Soviet Union, about half of what was requested.
-1992: Fire erupted at Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth's official residence west of London, causing much damage. The queen and Prince Andrew pitched in to help save priceless
artworks and other valuables housed in the castle.
-1993: The U.S. Senate approved the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

November 21
-1620: The Mayflower Compact, a preliminary plan of government, was signed.
-1694: French author Francois Voltaire was born.
-1783: In Paris, Jean de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes made the first free-flight ascent in a balloon.
-1785: William Beaumont, pioneer American army surgeon, was born.
-1787: British steamship company founder Samuel Cunard was born.
-1800: Congress met for the first time in Washington, D.C.
-1876: Novelist Olav Duun was born in Fosnes, Norway. His masterpiece is a series of novels entitled The People of Juvik (1918-1923).
-1888: Comic actor Harpo Marx was born.
-1904: Jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri (1904). He did a great deal to bring the tenor saxophone into prominence in jazz. The saxophone had previously been viewed as a sort of novelty. His mother was a pianist and organist and Hawkins studied cello and piano as a child. When he discovered the saxophone, he knew he had found his instrument. He played with blues singer Mamie Smith and then with the Fletcher Henderson Band. In 1940, Hawkins had just finished recording several songs when a producer convinced him to do one more song, "Body and Soul." Hawkins had no arrangement, but he agreed to try just one take, with no rehearsal. It became his most famous record.
-1920: St. Louis Cardinals batting champion Stan Musial was born.
-1934: Actor Lawrence Luckinbill was born. Novelist Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool, England . Her works include An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) and According to Queeney (2001).
-1937: Playwright Tina Howe was born in New York City. She is the author of many works, including Coastal Disturbances (1997).
-1938: Nazi forces occupied western Czechoslo