Madame Curie Day: November 7, 1867 - Polish chemist and physicist Marie Curie was born, winner of two Nobel Prizes for her work on radioactivity
International Merlot Day: 1784 - Merlot wine was first produced in Bordeaux, France
Notary Public Day: November 7, 1975 – sponsored by the National Notary Association (NNA), which was founded in 1957
Bangladesh – Revolution & Solidarity Day
France & Northern Catalonia – Treaty of the Pyrenees Day
Hungary – Hungarian Opera Day
Kyrgyzstan – History and Commemoration of Ancestors Days (November 7 & 8)
Liberia – Thanksgiving Day
Russia – Day of Military Glory
Tunisia – Commemoration Day (Ben Ali’s succession)
November 7th in History:
335 – Egypt: Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, is banished to Augusta Treverorum in Gaul (now Trier in Germany) after his Arian opponents claim he would try to cut off essential grain shipping from Egypt to Constantinople, and the eastern Roman Emperor Constantine I finds him guilty. Athanasius spends two years in exile in Gaul. When Constantine I dies, he is allowed to return to the See of Alexandria, only to have the exile order renewed by Constantine’s son, Constantius II. But this time Athanasius goes directly to Pope Julius in Rome, who summons a synod of bishops to re-examine the case, and Athanasius is proclaimed innocent to the Christian world. Meanwhile, Gregory of Cappadocia has usurped the Patriarchy of Alexandria. Athanasius would not be restored as Patriarch until 345
680 – Sixth Ecumenical Council of Orthodox, Catholic and other Christian leaders meet in Constantinople to condemn as heresy the idea that Jesus Christ has single energy and will instead of two energies and two wills (divine and human)
994 – Ibn Ḥazm, also called al-Andalusī aẓ-Ẓāhirī, born in Córdoba (now in Spain) Andalusian poet, historian, philosopher and theologian; he was a leading proponent/codifier of Zahiri school of Islamic thought; very influential thinker in the Muslim world, and a pioneer in comparative religious studies
1492 – The Ensisheim meteorite, the oldest meteorite with a known date of impact, hits Earth around noon in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France
1665 – The London Gazette, the oldest surviving journal, is first published
1687 – William Stukeley born, English pioneer in archaeology at Stonehenge
Stukeley 1723 drawing of Stonehenge
1775 – John Murray, Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, starts the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America by issuing Lord Dunmore’s Offer of Emancipation, to free any slaves who abandon their Colonial masters to fight for the British
1786 – The Stoughton Music Society, oldest U.S. performing musical organization, is founded
1837 – Abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy is shot dead by a mob in Alton IL, while attempting to protect his printing press from being destroyed a third time
1858 – Bipin Chandra Pal born, Indian nationalist and freedom fighter, author, orator and social reformer; one of the leaders of the Indian National Congress, noted as a proponent of Swadeshi (economic boycott) during the struggle for Indian independence, and in favor of national education. He somewhat disagreed with Mahatma Gandhi about the effectiveness of Non-Cooperation
1861 – The first Melbourne Cup horse race is held in Melbourne Australia
1872 – Leonora von Stosch Speyer, Lady Speyer, born in America, poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Fiddler’s Farewell; she played violin professionally before her first marriage, which ended in divorce; her second husband was Sir Edgar Speyer, a British banker
Lady Speyer - by John Singer Sargent
1874 – Thomas Nast’s cartoon, published in Harper’s Weekly, is considered the first important use of an elephant as a symbol for the Republican Party
1878 –Lise Meitner born in Austria-Hungary, Austrian-Swedish physicist; co-leader with Otto Hahn of the scientists who discovered the nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron, a process which was the basis of the WWII nuclear weapons developed by the U.S. at Los Alamos. She was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1938, and went to Sweden. In 1966, she shared the Enrico Fermi Award with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for their joint research which led to uranium fission
1878 – “Cissy” Eleanor Medill Patterson born, editor and publisher of the Washington Times-Herald; early crusader for home rule for the District of Columbia; as a novelist, known for Glass Houses, and Fall Flight
1879 –Leon Trotsky born, Russian theorist and politician, founder of the Red Army
1885 – Canadian Pacific Railway, Canada’s first transcontinental railway is completed at the Last Spike ceremony at Craigellachie, British Columbia
1893 – Margaret Leech born, American historian and fiction writer; won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize in History for the American Civil War era Reveille in Washington, the first woman to win for history, and the first, and to date only, woman to win twice in the history category when she won in 1960 for In the Days of McKinley, which was also awarded the Bancroft Prize; she was a regular at the famed Algonquin Round Table
1893 – Women in Colorado win the right to vote, the second state in the U.S. where woman suffrage passed, and the first state where it was enacted by popular referendum. In 1894, three Republican women – Clara Cressingham, Carrie Clyde Holly and Frances Klock– became the first women to be elected to any U.S. legislature when they were elected to the Colorado House of Representatives. They each served one term (1895-1896). The next woman to be elected to state office in Colorado was newspaperwoman Helen Robinson (1913-1916), the first woman to become a Colorado state senator, who was appointed as chair of the Colorado State Senate Education Committee. She traveled the U.S. making speeches in favor of national woman suffrage, and introduced a minimum wage for women bill in Colorado, but it failed to pass
1900 – Nellie Campobello, born as Maria Moya Luna, Mexican writer and poet who wrote Cartucho, a novel that chronicles the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), one of the few published works to document the revolution from a woman’s perspective; she was also a ballet dancer, choreographer, and director of la Escuela Plástica Dinámica (now the Mexican National School of Dance). Among her other works are the novel, Las manos de mama (The Hands of Mama) and Tres poemas (Three Poems). In 1985, Campobello suddenly disappeared, along with her belongings, including paintings by Orozco and Diego Rivera. She had given power of attorney to Claudio Fuentes Figueroa and his wife Maria Cristina Belmont, who took care of her house. Her whereabouts were unknown until 1998, when the Commission of Human Rights of the Federal District ruled that Nellie had died on July 9, 1986, after a death certificate for her was found, and the gravestone on a nameless grave at the Progreso de Obregón Cemetery of Hidalgo was discovered with her initials on it. The death certificate had been witnessed by Claudio Fuentes Figueroa
1903 – Ary Barroso born, Brazilian composer and songwriter; he was one of Brazil’s best-known songwriters in the first half of the 20th century, and composed many songs for Carmen Miranda
1903 – Konrad Lorenz born, Austrian zoologist, pioneering ethologist (animal behaviorist), and ornithologist; shared the 1973 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen for their discoveries of organization and social behavior patterns. Lorenz was noted for his work on imprinting as an instinctive bond among greylag geese
1907 – Jesús García, a railroad brakeman, dies at age 25 while saving the mining town of Nacozari de García in the Mexican state of Sonora by driving a burning train full of dynamite six kilometers (3.7 miles) away before it exploded
1908 – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are reported killed in Bolivia
1909 – Ruby Hurley born, American Civil Rights leader; administrator for the NAACP, setting up and running their first office in the Deep South, in Birmingham AL; she was on the committee that helped arrange the venue change for Marian Anderson to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, after she was barred by the DAR from singing at Constitution Hall because of her race
1910 – The Wright Brothers and department store owner Max Moorehouse undertake the first air freight shipment, from Dayton to Columbus in Ohio
1913 – Albert Camus born, French philosopher and author, 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, Journée Très Absurde
1914 – The New Republic publishes its first issue
1914 – R.A. Lafferty born, American writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy; Past Master, The Devil is Dead, Aurelia
1915 – M. Athalie Range, born in the Bahamas, American Civil Rights activist and Florida politician; a widowed mother of four, she began as a PTA parent campaigning against decaying segregated schools, joined the Civil Rights movement, and went on to be the first Black person on the Miami City Commission; then she became the first African-American since Reconstruction, and first woman, to head a Florida state agency, the Department of Community Affairs
1916 – Jeannette Rankin becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress
1917 – Helen Suzman born, South African politician and anti-Apartheid activist; Member for Houghton (1953-1989) of the South African Parliament, where she used every opportunity to speak out against discriminatory legislation and to defend the right of freedom of expression for all South Africans. She was a founding member of the Progressive Party in 1959, and its sole representative in parliament for the next 16 years. She visited prisons to inspect living conditions of prisoners, including those on Robben Island, and met with Nelson Mandela several times. Her reports improved prison conditions for several ANC prisoners, and she used her parliamentary privilege to evade government censorship, and pass information about the worst abuses of apartheid to the media. She was frequently reviled and derided as a Jew and as a woman by other members of Parliament and by Prime Minister P.W. Botha, both in Parliament and in the government-controlled press. Suzman was once accused by a minister of asking questions in parliament that embarrassed South Africa, to which she replied: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.” The UN honored her with its Human Rights Award in 1978, and the Medallion of Heroism in 1980, and she was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
1918 – The influenza epidemic spreads to Western Samoa, killing about 20% of the population by the end of the year
1919 – Ellen Stewart born, influential American theatre director-producer, founder of La MaMa, an experimental theatre company in NYC, which produced the first plays of many new playwrights, including Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and Harvey Fierstein, and gave actors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Bette Midler some of their first roles
1921 – ‘Lisa Ben’ born as Edythe Eyde, American LGBT rights activist, writer and singer-songwriter; while working as a secretary at RKO Studios in Los Angeles, she became the founder and publisher of the lesbian magazine Vice Versa in 1947, but was forced to stop publishing when she lost her job at RKO in 1948, and her new position left her no opportunity to type the magazine articles at work. In the 1950s, she was a contributor to the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, The Ladder. Noted for her song, “Cruisin’ Down the Boulevard,” one of the first recorded lesbian songs. Inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Hall of Fame in 2010
1921 – Susanne Hirzel born, a German music student who became a member of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance group; she was arrested and convicted in 1943 of distributing leaflets, but sentenced to six months in prison, because the prosecution was unable to establish that she had knowledge of the leaflets’ contents; after 1945, she became a cello teacher, and wrote a series of books on cello technique
1922 – Al Hirt born, American trumpet player and bandleader
1925 – Barbara Wertheimer born, author; noted for We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America; a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women
1926 – Joan Sutherland born, Australian-Swiss soprano
1929 – In New York City, the Museum of Modern Art opens to the public
1933 – Fiorello H. La Guardia is elected the 99th mayor of New York City
1939 – Barbara Liskov, American computer scientist; one of the first U.S. women to be granted a doctorate in computer science; Turing Award winner for the Liskov substitution principle; Institute Professor at MIT
1943 – Joni Mitchell born, Canadian singer-songwriter; winner of nine Grammy awards; regarded as one of the most important and influential women recording artists of the late 20th century
1943 – Silvia Cartwright born, New Zealand jurist; served on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and played a major role in the drafting of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; presided over the 1988 inquiry into issues relating to treatment of cervical cancer at Auckland’s National Women’s Hospital, known as the Cartwright Inquiry; first woman Chief District Court Judge (1989-1993) and first woman appointed to New Zealand’s High Court (1993); the second woman appointed as New Zealand’s Governor-General (2001-2006); she was one of four women appointed, out of 16 international judges, by Cambodia’s Supreme Council of Magistracy to the Trial Chamber of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal investing war crimes and human rights abuses (2006-2014); appointed to the UN Human Rights Council investigation into war crimes and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka in 2014
1944 – Franklin D. Roosevelt elected for a record fourth term as U.S. President, but he dies in April 1945
1944 – Hannah Szenes, Hungarian Jewish poet; at age 23, she is one of 37 Mandate Palestine paratroopers dropped into Hungary by the British Army during WWII to rescue Hungarian Jews about to be deported to Auschwitz; she is arrested near the Hungarian border, imprisoned and tortured, but refuses to reveal any details of her mission, and after a pro forma trial, is executed by firing squad on this day. A national heroine of Israel, where her poetry is widely known; Israel Hatzeira headquarters and several streets are named for her
1947 – Rebecca Eaton born, American television and film producer; best known as the executive producer since 1985 of the PBS Masterpiece series; her productions have been awarded 62 Primetime Emmy Awards, 16 Peabody Awards, 6 Golden Globes, and 2 Academy Award nominations
1950 – Alexa Canady born, the first African-American woman to become a neurosurgeon. She earned a B.S. degree in zoology from the University of Michigan in 1971, and graduated from the medical school there in 1975. As a young Black woman completing her surgical internship at Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1975, on her first day of residency, she was tending to her patients when one of the hospital's top administrators passed through the ward. As he went by, she heard him say, "Oh, you must be our new equal-opportunity package." Working as a neurosurgeon at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (1981-1982), her fellow physicians voted her one of the top residents. Dr. Canady was chief of neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital of Michigan from 1987 until her retirement in June 2001. During her twenty-year career in pediatric neurosurgery, most of her patients were age ten or younger, and facing life-threatening illnesses, gunshot wounds, head trauma, hydrocephaly, and other brain injuries or diseases
1956 – Suez Crisis: The UN General Assembly adopts a resolution calling for the United Kingdom, France and Israel to immediately withdraw their troops from Egypt
1956 – Hungarian Revolution: After most armed resistance by the revolutionaries had been defeated by an invading Soviet force, Communist leader János Kádár returns to Budapest in a Soviet armored convoy, to be installed by the Soviets as the next Hungarian General Secretary. Kádár remains in office until 1988
1962 – Poor loser Richard Nixon, defeated in his race for governor of California, tells reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
1967 – Carl B. Stokes is elected mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, the first African American mayor of a major American city
1967 – LBJ signs the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
1972 – Richard Nixon is re-elected as U.S president
1973 – U.S. Congress overrides Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution, which limits presidential power to wage war without congressional approval
1979 – The Rose, movie starring Bette Midler, premieres in Los Angeles CA
1987 – Singapore’s first Mass Rapid Transit line opens
1989 – ‘Nadya Tolokno’ born as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Russian conceptual artist and political activist, member of the Anarchist Feminist group Pussy Riot
1990 – Mary Robinson elected as the first woman president of the Republic of Ireland
1991 – Magic Johnson announces he has tested positive for the AIDS virus and is retiring from basketball
1994 – WXYC, the student radio station of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, does the world’s first internet radio broadcast
1996 – NASA launches the Mars Global Surveyor
2000 – George W. Bush is put in the White House on a partisan vote of the Supreme Court, after a month of controversy over election results in Florida
2000 – Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected to the U.S. Senate (D-NY), the first First Lady to win public office
2009 – The Democratic-controlled House narrowly passes, 220-215, the ACA, landmark health care legislation expands coverage to tens of millions who were without insurance, and placing tough new restrictions on the insurance industry
2011 – Two vessels, the Tahrir and the Saoirse, sponsored by Freedom Waves to Gaza, sail from Turkey carrying $30,000 USD worth of medicines, with activists and journalists on board from nine countries. Their aim was to break Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza, which has been in effect since June 2007, when Hamas seized control of the territory. The activists were thwarted by the Israeli Navy
2017 – Newspaper reports begin to add details concerning the Texas gunman who killed 26 people at the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church on November 5. He had been sending threatening text messages to his mother-in-law, who was a member of the congregation, and was able to purchase the assault-style rifle and two handguns which he used in the mass murder, in spite of his 2012 domestic violence conviction, subsequent 12 months in confinement, and discharge from the Air Force. Under federal law, this conviction should have disqualified him from purchasing or possessing firearms. Apparently, the Special Investigations Office at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico failed to enter the record of his conviction in the national database
2020 – American women politicians reacted to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris becoming the first woman, first Black and first South Asian U.S. vice president. Stacey Abrams, who worked tirelessly to register Black voters in Georgia and make sure their votes counted, said, "It is a privilege in this nation to be able to see yourself reflected in the face of leadership and for both the African-American community and the Indian American community and for women of color at large. Kamala Harris' election signals that the face of leadership does change, that we do have a role to play beyond being supporters and advocates and adjutants, that we can be the leaders of this country and I think it is an exceptional moment that we are experiencing in this country.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said, "For so many of us, especially women, we have grown up -- I know my entire childhood, we grew up being told women are too emotional and that this country would never elect, first, a Black president – and luckily that happened with the election of Barack Obama -- but now a woman of color and no less a Black woman to the second highest seat in the land. It's really remarkable ... you can't be what you can't see. That is very often said and it's so amazing that so many little girls are growing up with this being a norm for them." Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), who watched Harris speak on television with her 8-year-old daughter, reported, "And the first thing Ilwad said to me was, 'This is someone who looks like me, Mama.’ We can't lose sight of the fact representation is powerful, that she has now allowed so many little girls, not just in our country but around the world, to see themselves as somebody who can ascend to one of the highest offices in our nation and as she said, that anything can be possible if you're willing to work for it."
